Mr. Stephen Mulvany:

One of the recent reports, which probably goes to the heart of the Deputy's question, is from the Parliamentary Budget Office, PBO, which notes that while the HSE under legislation is required to report on an accruals basis, the Oireachtas naturally deals in cash and Vote accounting. Currently, our capacity to report on cash and Vote is largely limited to those former health board areas. However, the new integrated financial management system, IFMS, which went live in July in the east of the country, will give us the capacity to report in cash terms by what we call profit centres; in other words at whatever level the Departments of Health and Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform, agree they want. Regardless of whether this is by care group or by location, we will be able to report both in INE and in cash terms, and cash is very close to both. That will make it much more straightforward to address the point the PBO raised, which is when one body is by legislation dealing in INE terms, but is being funded in cash terms, it is difficult to do, for example, cash-based programmatic budgeting. We do programmatic budgeting on an INE basis but we cannot do that because of the systems on a cash Vote basis. In the coming months, we will be able to turn that on in the part of the country where we have gone live with IFMS. By the end of 2025, when all the HSE statutory part is on that system, we will be able to do that for the full statutory system. Seeing how money flowing from the Oireachtas is getting spent is one thing that will make it more straightforward.