Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The Comptroller and Auditor General’s office and the Committee of Public Accounts keep an eye on all that. As usual, accounts and financial statements will be published on the committee’s web page as part of our minutes.

The third item is correspondence. As previously agreed, items that were not flagged for discussion for this meeting will continue to be dealt with in according to proposed actions that have been circulated. Decisions taken by the committee in relation to correspondence are recorded in the minutes of the meeting and published on the web page. The first category of correspondence under which members have flagged items for discussion is B, which is correspondence from accounting officers and their Minister of the committee. A number of items were held over from last week for this week’s meeting, because the member who had raised it was not present etc. The first three items relate to the closure of the Benefacts database. I propose that we take them together. Is that agreed? Agreed.

Item R1378 is from Mr. David Moloney, Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. It is dated 26 July 2022 and it provides information that had been requested by the committee regarding the public funding of Benefacts. The second item of correspondence is R1403 and is from Mr. Pádraig Dalton, director general of the CSO, dated 26 July and also regarding Benefacts. It says to provide a substitute for the database Benefacts provided to the CSO the director general tentatively estimates a cost of €500,000 per year for staff plus technology investment in the first one or two years of approximately €200,000 to €250,000 with ongoing hardware and software costs. However, the director general states that such investment is not likely given that there are other initiatives in train, although those initiatives will not provide all the data that the CSO will require to meet EU legislation. That data that had been available on Benefacts, is obviously lost. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has stated that it has engaged with a number of Departments regarding the data provided by Benefacts. It is not clear if it engaged with the CSO, which appears to have relied heavily on the data and information from the Benefacts research, and we can see this in their document. Members will also want to be made aware that a further related item from the Department of Rural and Community Development has been received and is due to be considered at next week’s meeting.