Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

As members are aware, the Secretary General of the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform is the Accounting Office for a number of Votes, reflecting the diverse responsibility of the Department for the development and administration of a number of key cross-departmental functions in specialised and technical areas. Separate to the accountability that the Vote-holding entails, and arising from its statutory responsibility in relation to central control and oversight of public spending, the Department sets the general accounting policies for all appropriation accounts, and issues binding directions around public financial management and procedures, and the corporate governance of public bodies.

I am happy to report that I issued clear audit opinions in relation to each of the appropriation accounts for 2020 being considered this morning.

The 2020 appropriation account for Vote 11 - Office of the Minister for Public Expenditure and Reform, records gross expenditure of almost €42 million. This spending was divided between two spending programmes, which were broadly similar in scale and which comprise the core administration activity of the Department. At the end of 2020, the Department had a surplus of €4.2 million relative to its budget and this amount was surrendered.

Vote 12 - superannuation and retired allowances is used to pay pensions, primarily to retired civil servants across all Departments and offices, and to retired prison officers. Pension payments for other public servants are charged, directly or indirectly, to other Votes, including those for education, health, An Garda Síochána and Army pensions, and to the Central Fund of the Exchequer.

The gross spend on Vote 12 in 2020 amounted to €628 million. Appropriations-in-aid, mainly comprising employee pension contributions, amounted to €366 million in 2020. The receipts into the Vote were significantly ahead of the level forecast. Mainly because of this, the net outturn on the Vote for 2020 was a surplus of €113 million, which was for surrender at the year end. A similar level of surrender of surplus occurred in 2019.

The Office of Government Procurement, which is often referred to as OGP, carries out specialised functions in relation to the procurement of goods and services by public bodies in Ireland. The 2020 appropriation account for Vote 39 - Office of Government Procurement records gross expenditure of €16.5 million. The surplus for surrender at the end of 2020 amounted to €2.3 million.

Vote 43 - Office of the Government Chief Information Officer was established as a new vote in 2020, having previously been a programme within Vote 11. As a result, the appropriation account appears without comparator prior-year figures. Like the OGP, the office remains legally part of the Department. The office provides an ICT shared service to a number of Departments and offices, which includes the provision of managed desktop services, including telephone, email and productivity applications. The office also provides Government cloud and Government network services, including application hosting, and voice, video and data services across the public service. The 2020 appropriation account for Vote 43 records gross expenditure of €21.4 million.

Chapter 4 on Vote accounting and budget management is a recurrent annual report which aggregates and summarises the results of all appropriation accounts. I publish this report because there is no other source of aggregated appropriation account information.

There has been a strong upward trend in voted expenditure in recent years, with an even greater increase in 2020 as a result of additional expenditure requirements due to the Covid-19 pandemic. The total gross expenditure for all 45 Votes in 2020 was €70.1 billion. After the deduction of receipts retained in Votes totalling €2.8 billion, net voted expenditure for the year was €67.3 billion.