Patrick O'Donovan (Limerick County, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I thank the Deputy very much. I am taking this question for the Minister of State, Deputy Ossian Smyth. The delivery of the financial management shared services centre and programme was approved by the Government in 2020 with an indicative timeline through 2025 and assigned a budget of €115 million. The programme plays a central role in the delivery of the Civil Service renewal programme and represents one of the largest transformations of financial management for central government in recent times.

The programme moves all financial transaction processing and reporting for all of central government onto a new single financial management system run on the Oracle E-Business Suite. Fundamental to the transformation is the implementation of a single common chart of accounts and integrated standardised accounting processes across Government. The benefits of this new central accounting system and finance shared services are to include: reform and modernisation of financial management practices and processes; the standardisation of accounting processes across central government, ensuring our compliance with existing and emerging international reporting and transparency requirements; support for EU and Government policy on e-invoicing, e-procurement and help to better manage suppliers and procurement expenditure; support for the professionalisation of finance teams across Government Departments, ensuring that all finance users are following standard best practice processes on a single system; and the replacement of over 30 disparate legacy financial and reporting systems.

This is a highly complex transformation programme which, when fully operational, will support some 50 central Government Departments and bodies, centralising all financial processing activity and delivering standardisation across financial reporting.

Despite the challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic, the programme went live in April 2022 with eight entities, including the Department of Public Expenditure, National Development Plan Delivery and Reform. The programme sees the National Shared Services Office, NSSO, launch its third service with finance shared services having now completed a full year in operation. As with all complex transformation projects, there have been challenges following implementation. In particular, the lessons the NSSO has learned from the first wave will be applied to enhance the next wave. All Departments have filed their year-end 2022 appropriation accounts within the required deadline. Engagement with the second wave of clients is under way and indicative timelines will be reviewed as part of this engagement.

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