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

Ms Jennifer Banim:

I know the issue the Chairman is referring to. It is county incomes and value added across the counties. The figures are benchmarked against our regular annual production cycle. In June 2019 we will be producing definitive figures for 2018 and then we work on from that on things like the county incomes and the value added. What we have done in the last iterations of those county incomes, in acknowledgement of the fact that they are important to people to have up-to-date data, is we have put in provision for very preliminary estimates for the latest year, if I can put it that way. So when we are going out we put in the latest year as well in there. Just as the Chairman said, people need more timely data on it. For the annual data it can be difficult to get the sources, but we can always do something on partial sources and we do that where we can.