Ms Helen Dixon:

The DPC has stated that its funding needs to continue to increase and acknowledges the incremental increases in its funding over the past five years. Given the scale of the challenges the committee has heard so much about, there is no doubt that we need to continue and increase the funding of the commission. In fact, looking back at the budget we have been granted over the past couple of years, we have generally been granted close to what we required on the pay side of the budget. We have not had to forgo any recruitment. Particularly in light of challenges that we faced in recruiting last year and slower than expected recruitment because of the need to move testing and interviewing processes remotely, we did not use up our full budget. We have managed to continue to recruit as much as we can each year within our pay budget. On the issue of recruitment of staff, the Senator will have seen in the pre-budget submission we made that the real issue is around getting sanction at the grades and salary levels we need for the specialists we require at the DPC and at senior grades who would report directly to me, as commissioner.

There has been a bigger gap in the funding we have been granted for non-pay-related functions. The types of things we have ended up forgoing, and which were forgone anyway because of circumstances, relate to the office space the DPC has been seeking to procure for years. We had hoped to move all our Dublin-based staff into a new Dublin headquarters. That has not happened because, despite the Office of Public Works, OPW, identifying a suitable new building off Baggot Street to house the DPC, the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform declined sanction for it. As a result, we did not require all of the non-pay expenditure that was allocated in that direction.

Our funding does need to increase. We also need to increase our capability to recruit staff at the grades and levels we need in order for us to do more with our non-pay budget. We have drawn up a large tender that will be published shortly, work on which started last year because it is a big project. It is a request for tenders from multiple suppliers to supply advice across a range of technologies and Internet technologies, and to conduct forensic testing on behalf of the DPC related to some of our Internet investigations. We do not have the types of resources and expertise needed to draw up that large tender document, nor can we recruit staff to do it, as a result of which things take longer and we spend less on the technology advice we need to procure. Those are the types of budget issues we are facing.