Paschal Donohoe (Dublin Central, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I take the Chairman's point about the issue of timing. Clearly, the sooner we can have material shared with the committee the better, but we do face challenges in doing that from a departmental point of view.

A concrete example would be the stability programme update, SPU. We would struggle to do an SPU any earlier than we do at the moment because even when we do that update, we only have a single quarter of tax revenue available to analyse. Our ability to form a projection regarding our economic performance for a year any earlier than April is limited. If we were trying to produce forecasts for this committee in quarter 1 about the economic outlook for the year, we would only have a month of two worth of data available to us and we would run the risk of sharing forecasts with the committee that would be plain wrong and that could cause difficulty later in the year.

The option for a no policy change budget is, in effect, made available when the White Paper on expenditure and receipts is published but that does not happen, typically, until the Friday night before the budget. Perhaps in the coming year we could look at the possibility of providing the committee with some kind of a starting position for the budget before any new policy decisions are made. A considerable amount of information is made available about the budgetary process. The wealth of information contained in, for example, the tax strategy group papers gives a sizeable amount of advice and perspective to the committee. If the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform manages to repeat the expenditure review process that has happened in other years, a huge volume of data regarding how we spend money within our country is available. There may be opportunities to bring it forward to a little bit earlier in the year but I am not sure that we can do that in the way the Deputy is suggesting without undermining the accuracy of what we are doing.