Ms Patricia Quinn:

Benefacts is best known to the general public for its free, searchable website, which has listings for every non-profit organisation that is registered with a national authority, be it the Companies Registration Office, CRO, Revenue, the Department of Education and Skills, the Registrar of Friendly, Industrial and Provident Societies, the Charities Regulatory Authority or others.

We follow international precedents in defining non-profits as those organisations that are not part of Government or the private sector. This includes charities, of course, but also tens of thousands of other non-profits as well. Like any other member of the public, we access the data on these entities from the datasets made available by regulators or registrars. We are able to do this thanks to the open data regulations which the Minister spoke to the committee about a few minutes ago and which have been so energetically promoted in Ireland in recent years. This means that as long as there is no particular reason for data held by public authorities to be kept private, it should be made public and in a highly accessible way.

We clean the data which we source from these different public regulatory bodies and add value in a number of ways. In the first instance we clean the data and match up the different numbers and identities, trading names and regulatory features of all non-profits so that they are merged into a single file. We socialise the data, meaning we make it much more readily accessible than would otherwise be the case. For example, a member of the public has to pay the CRO an administrative fee each time he or she wants to access company records. We digitise it, which involves a large manual effort, because we extract governance and financial data from paper files, including the financial statements of more than 9,000 companies, unions, friendly societies and political parties. This makes the data much more readily accessible than would otherwise be the case. We augment the data with address information where we can find it, including Eircodes, but also the address of an organisation on the Internet or its URL. We classify it using a classification standard with 54 sub-categories, which makes the data more easily understood for people interested in those particular sub-sectors.

This categorisation is derived from an international standard which is also used by the UN and EUROSTAT.

We assign a unique identifier to every organisation. This is very much in keeping with best current thinking in statistical planning, because it means that organisations can be recognised using this single number even if they have a variety of names or identities, or if they use names in both Irish and English. Having one number keyed against all of its other numbers or identifiers means that stakeholders, whether funders, volunteers, beneficiaries or policy maker, have a clear line of sight and are able to validate an organisation’s identity for the first time.

Finally, the value that we add is to publish the information freely in a variety of formats and platforms. The most basic dataset for 20,000 non-profit organisations appears on the Government’s open data portal, data.gov.ie. We publish it in machine-readable form and it is updated daily. This means that information about the body of non-profit organisations which make up civil society organisations in Ireland is accessible by people all over the world. Indeed, it is used by people from outside Ireland as well as from within. We also publish a free public website, , where thousands of people access the data on these organisations every month, for a variety of purposes. This data includes, for the first time, a source where anybody can go to find information about the sources of grant income or fee income from Government. People can now go to a free site and discover what the balance or mix of funding from various sources is. This is information that is already in the public domain but is not readily accessible.

There are other users of our data and our information and web services. Last year we built the online register of charities for the Charities Regulatory Authority, which can be viewed on its website, and we have facilitated the regulator in making the accounts of incorporated charities available to the public, which was not possible previously. We provide a quarterly data feed to the Central Statistics Office, CSO, which it draws on in making Ireland’s statutory returns to EUROSTAT. We provided a large body of data to support a research project by the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service, IGEES, as well as extensive data files and supports to the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General and the Charities Regulatory Authority to assist them in their statutory functions. Already this year we have provided various data files on request to a major charity, an employee giving scheme in a large commercial organisation, a charities representative organisation and to the Housing Agency. We have also commenced work on data research projects with the Departments of Justice and Equality and The Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection. We are in discussions with other Departments as well.

The Minister mentioned that he had launched our first annual sector analysis report last year, and I am very pleased that he has agreed to launch our second report in April. This is a kind of annual rendering of account for the entire sector, and gives the public an idea of the form and structure of civil society organisations in this country, and the scope of their contribution to our society. Our report describes the scale of turnover, which amounts to almost €11 billion, employment in the sector, amounting to 150,000 people, the extent of Government funding, amounting to €5.3 billion or about 8% of current Exchequer spending, the pattern of higher remuneration in the sector, which is very significantly lower than that enjoyed by people working in other sectors, contrary to popular opinion on the subject, and the profile of philanthropic support, which we know very little about in this country.

I want to talk briefly about the power of full population data, because most of the information that has been gathered until now about the work of this sector comes from survey information, in other words partial, occasional surveys which are undertaken from time to time, which are expensive and which tend not to be comparable with each other. By gathering data year on year and promoting better disclosure habits on the part of non-profit organisations and public bodies alike, and continually seeking new sources of public data, we are building an unprecedented knowledge infrastructure to support research and policy making and decision making within this sector.

Last year, with the active co-operation of a range of partners, including more than 70 participants in the HSE alone, we piloted a new service for decision makers called Benefacts Analytics. This prototype service provides detailed governance, compliance and risk analysis information structured in bespoke portfolios and derived from the audited financial statements of almost 10,000 non-profit organisations. It allows registered users to see a body of sensitive information – which of course is already accessible, one by one, in paper format – presented in a digital format that allows non-specialists to interpret comparative and historical trend data, and helps them to identify lead indicators of certain kinds of financial or governance risk. It has many other benefits as well.

In the future we plan to roll out Benefacts Analytics in partnership with public and philanthropic partners. We believe it has the potential not just to reduce uncertainty and risk, but ultimately to help streamline non-profit organisations' engagement with their Government funders. Our contention is that the cost of doing business with Government, in terms of duplication of administrative effort alone, is one of the biggest avoidable overheads for the sector.

We are very excited about the potential for local data derived from the published registers of public participation networks to augment the database of Irish non-profit organisations we have created. Potentially, the input of additional data about local societies, clubs and associations might double the size of the database to 40,000 organisations, or perhaps more. This year we intend to incorporate the financial records of unincorporated charities, including many religious bodies, as soon as legal obstacles have been resolved by the Charities Regulatory Authority. We are planning to add a much smaller group of civil society organisations, namely political parties, to the dataset, with the co-operation of the Clerk of the Dáil and the Standards in Public Office Commission, which last year made this set of financial statements publicly available for the first time. We plan to release a new edition of the website, benefacts.ie, in the summer, responding to user feedback and helping many more people to exploit the benefits of an evidence base to support decisions about, and understanding of, Ireland’s civil society organisations.

I thank the committee, and we welcome any questions members might have.