A NEW WEBSITE allowing the public to search more than €108 billion in reported State spending has been launched by Fianna Fáil TD Albert Dolan.

StateSpend.ie brings together purchase orders and payments published by government departments, local authorities, health and education bodies and other State agencies.

The site currently contains more than 622,000 records, with a combined reported value of €108.8 billion, covering records dating from 2011 to the second quarter of this year.

On the site, you can search for individual suppliers, public bodies or descriptions of purchases, as well as examining spending over time.

Among the public bodies with the largest value of records included in the database are the HSE, at around €12.7 billion, Uisce Éireann, listed on the site as Irish Water, at €11.6 billion, and Transport Infrastructure Ireland, at around €9 billion.

However, the figures do not represent all State spending.

The website brings together information which has been published by individual public bodies, and the amount and quality of available data varies between organisations and time periods.

Purchase orders don’t necessarily represent completed payments and the site states that a high level of reported spending with a particular supplier does not, by itself, indicate poor value or wrongdoing.
StateSpend.ie is an expanded version of a public spending tracker launched by Dolan and The Problem Solving Association last year, when the dataset contained €78.5 billion in records.

Dolan said the work involved identifying gaps in published information and standardising thousands of files so they could be searched together.

“This has involved much more than building a website,” Dolan said.

“My team and I worked to find the reports, identify gaps, pursue missing information and turn thousands of inconsistently formatted files into a dataset people could actually use.

“We want journalists, researchers and the public to use this work.”

The project says its work contributed to first-time or expanded publication of spending records by bodies including Transport Infrastructure Ireland, RTÉ, Tusla, Nama, the Arts Council and the HSE.

Dolan said there are limitations to what can be established from the data, including whether a particular contract represented value for money or what was ultimately delivered.

“It cannot, on its own, tell us whether a contract delivered what was promised or whether the State got value for money,” Dolan said.

Dolan has also submitted the Tender to Payment (Public Spending Transparency) Bill, which proposes linking records covering tenders, contracts, purchase orders, invoices and payments “so we can trace public money through the system and connect it to what was actually delivered”.