Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Wednesday, 28 June 2023

Committee on Budgetary Oversight

Public Service Performance Report 2022

Dr. Patrick Moran:

We set out the guidance and framework for doing that. We also support the Irish Government Economic and Evaluation Service, IGEES, units in carrying out spending reviews to examine them in more detail and to use that information to inform policy development within Departments and, by extension, the budgetary allocations. What we in the Department are doing specifically to track expenditure across all the different dimensions is that, as Ms O'Loughlin said, we are implementing a tagging system on the expenditure management system so that each of the different subheads, which are the lowest level of granularity in the Revised Estimates Volume and shows where all the budget allocations are going, will be tagged against those dimensions in the well-being framework. That will allow us to look at overall public expenditure through the lens of well-being. Instead of looking at it through Department allocations, it will look at what those allocations are designed to do in terms of the different outcomes in the well-being framework.