Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 18 October 2018
Public Accounts Committee
2016 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 6 - Vote Accounting and Budget Management
Vote 11 - Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform
Vote 12 - Superannuation and Retired Allowances
2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Chapter 2 - Collection of Pension Contributions due to the Exchequer
Chapter 3 - Control of Funding for Voted Public Services
Chapter 5 - Vote Accounting and Budget Management
Vote 11 - Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform
Vote 12 - Superannuation and Retired Allowances
Comptroller and Auditor General Special Report 95: Financial Reporting in the Public Sector
Comptroller and Auditor General Special Report 99: Public Sector Financial Reporting for 2015
Comptroller and Auditor General Special Report 100: Public Sector Financial Reporting for 2016
9:00 am
Mr. Robert Watt:
We naively assumed that when we had put all the data on the open data, and we have more than 8,000 data sets now, that would reduce the volume of FOI requests because people would access the data from the portal. In fact, the number of FOI requests has increased since we amended the Act. It has led to an increase of more than 40% in the number of FOI requests and last year we had 37,000 FOI requests, so it has not reduced the number. Part of the motivation for us is to be more out there when it comes to the availability of data and putting them on websites.
We put nearly everything up on our website. We just put it up there. We hoped that would reduce the volume of freedom of information requests but it has not. The philosophy since 2012 is to be much more open and transparent around publication. We now publish pretty much everything. There are a whole variety of administrative data which are available for the first time and we have an enormous level of activity on the site with people downloading the data sets. It is an important innovation. It was guided by the wish to reduce the volume of FOI requests, which are administratively time-consuming, and for people to go to the website to access the data themselves.