Brian Hayes (Dublin South West, Fine Gael)
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Question 405: To ask the Minister for Social and Family Affairs the number of financial management systems in place in his Department; the persons who provided his Department with these systems; the cost of maintaining the software; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [6003/08]

Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)
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Oracle Financials is the financial management system which produces the Departments two statutory accounts annually. These two accounts — the Appropriation Account and the Social Insurance Fund account — showed an annual outturn of €7.3 billion and €7.7 billion respectively for 2006, the last year for which full information is available.

This financial system is used widely across the public and private sectors and supports the normal range of accounting functions such as General Ledger, Accounts Payable, Purchasing, Inventory and Fixed Assets. The system was initially acquired in 1998 at a cost of €480,000. The implementation was done by CFM following a competitive tendering process. A separate query and reporting tool known as Business Objects was also implemented in tandem with Oracle Financials to provide management reporting facilities.

The most recent annual software licence and support fee for Oracle Financials application and database software was €60,000.

The Oracle Financials system is monitored on an ongoing basis and has been upgraded regularly to keep up with emerging business needs. The most recent upgrade in 2006 was implemented at a cost €235,000.

The Department has a number of large-scale payment systems through which sixty two million payment transactions are generated annually. While these systems would include some financial accounting features, the payment and receipts data related to these payment systems is fed into Oracle's general ledger where all Departmental expenditure is brought to account and it is from the general ledger that the Department's annual accounts are produced.