Ciarán Lynch (Cork South Central, Labour) | Oireachtas source

This is something we dealt with during the consultation process. If the information is held in an Excel document, the difficulty in issuing an Excel document is that it is open to further manipulation. Someone can insert new figures into an Excel document and it can be transferred onwards. The concern raised is that if information is provided in electronic format it should be issued in a format that is closed, like a PDF. The person can get a copy of it but it cannot be manipulated. The committee's recommendation was to provide records in machine-readable formats. That is the concern of the committee.