Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 11 April 2019

Public Accounts Committee

2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 4 - Central Statistics Office

9:00 am

Mr. Pádraig Dalton:

Quite simply, under reservation means that we have concerns about the data source. The quarterly data we publish relates to recorded crime and the only source of recorded crime statistics is PULSE. The Deputy will be aware of the issues that have arisen with the underlying quality of some of the data on the PULSE system. Most recently, there were questions around homicide statistics but there have other areas as well. We suspended publication because we felt we could not stand over the statistics back in 2014. We suspended a second time in 2016. Even when we were publishing, we were adding heavy caveats so if one looked at the release even back at that time-----