Dáil Éireann Debate, Tuesday - 25 July 2023
220. Deputy Catherine Murphy asked the Minister for Transport if information made public by the Road Safety Authority is audited in the context of quality control of the data and its accuracy (details supplied). [36295/23]
View answerThe Road Safety Authority (RSA) publish a monthly breakdown of penalty point statistics on their website. These statistics are cumulative figures, which are rolling over a 3-year period. Penalty points that have expired are removed and points that have been acquired are added to these cumulative figures.
Monthly snapshots of the offence data are extracted from the Department's National Vehicle and Driver File (the NVDF) and loaded into a statistic database. From these snapshots two types of report are generated. One for the RSA (as above) and at the end of each year these snapshots are used to generate a report that Central Statistics Office (CSO) publish, reporting the number of points newly allocated each year. The RSA and CSO data will always differ as the former is measuring cumulative points applied and the CSO report measures points newly applied in the reference year.
Currently the Department of Transport does not audit these reports but there are plans in the future to conduct an exercise of this nature. As part of a new Departmental Data Strategy being developed, there will be an emphasis on data governance and management. In the implementation of this strategy, the scripts to generate these reports will be reviewed and an audit process put in place.
