Seán Canney (Galway East, Independent) | Oireachtas source

I thank the witnesses for their presentations. The amount of money involved in the budget can be overwhelming. When you read documents and reports, you get confused. I am concerned when Revenue bring forward a set of figures that are different from the Department's set of figures and are working from a different base. There needs to be common approach to how reporting is done, be it from Revenue or somewhere else.

To pick up on Deputy Boyd Barrett's point about the breakdown of particular spends, when the witnesses say we are spending so much on housing and there is a top-line figure, underneath that a breakdown is there before budget day. I presume it is not the case that they are picking a figure and try to match figures to it afterwards. It is there beforehand. There is a scientific proposition regarding this. It is important that as a budgetary oversight committee, we see more of how things are done.

Regarding the capital cost under-runs last year and the year before and how they are accounted for, do they just go back into the pot and we start afresh the following year? In the past couple of years, we have underspends. We might have overspends given inflation. How does the Department track that going through the year or going through the process? For example, in the area of housing, does it get a quarterly report from every local authority setting out what they spent? Does it get reports from any Department regarding how money is being spent? Is it being tracked or does the Department wait until the end of the year when the all the receipts are in? How is that done and how is that accounted for? If there is a programme of works to be done and there is expenditure to go with it, if the expenditure is not coming up to what it should be in the projections, obviously the programme has fallen behind and perhaps corrective action could be taken during the course of the year rather than leaving it and finding out it has fallen short. I do not know how that can be done.

When Dr. Seán Healy was here last week, he spoke about how a €20 increase for those on a fixed income should have been a baseline, as opposed to an increase of €12.50. The €20 increase was to meet inflation. He said this was a missed opportunity. What is the Department's attitude towards the linking of social welfare payments and inflation, setting a baseline and working from there so that every year, the increases will be in line with inflation to keep living standards level with inflation as opposed to people falling behind?