I refer further to parliamentary questions 271 to 273 of 8 December which my Department received late afternoon on 6 December. For the sake of clarity, my Department has not declined to provide the information sought by the Deputy. As explained in my response it was not possible to provide the extensive detail being sought by the Deputy in the limited time available for response.
It should be appreciated that the Deputy is seeking 9 years of payroll data spread over 11 different pay bands. There are currently 1,100 people on the Department’s payroll and the indicative total of all records falling under the scope of the Deputy’s questions will be in excess of 11,000 records spanning back to 2007.
By way of context, my Department’s payroll operation has not yet transitioned to the centralised Payroll Shared Services provided through the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. The scheduling for transitioning different Departments into the Payroll Shared Services operations has been undertaken on a tranched basis, Department by Department. This process has been undertaken at a timescale organised and overseen by the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. My Department is, therefore, not yet in a position to avail of the benefits of the Payroll Shared Services greater analytical capacity. My Department, however, is scheduled to transition to Payroll Shared Services next summer.
In the meantime, my Department’s Payroll software is not as customised to the same extent as Payroll Shared Services. Therefore facilitation of such extensive data requests, such as these made by the Deputy spanning over 9 years, can take longer to be finalised.
Nevertheless, I have requested my officials to work on this issue as a matter of urgency and I hope that the detailed information requested can be provided to the Deputy very shortly.
