Month: February 2012

Minister for Education Ruairi Quinn has been asked to explain a second expenses claim, this time relating to a month in which he spent 22 days on holiday.

In August 2011, Mr Quinn signed off on a claim for 2,800 kilometres worth around E800 despite the fact his official diary shows that he was working for only nine days that month.

That works out at an average of 311 kilometres every day, the equivalent of a round-trip to Waterford on each working day, about four hours driving time.

His diary makes apparent less than 1,000 kilometres of the total that was claimed for, including two trips to Maynooth and a trip to Clifden.

Here is the detailed story I wrote about this expense claim.

Also published here are Minister Quinn’s expense claims for the period between March and the end of August 2011, and those of his colleague in the Department of Education Ciaran Cannon over a similar period.

Ruairi Quinn’s official diary for August 2011, which lists him as having been on holiday from August 6 to August 28 – apart from a single day – can also be examined.

Here are the claims:

July diary:

August diary:

Education Minister Ruairi Quinn has been asked this week to explain a mileage claim he made in July of last year.

For the month in question, Mr Quinn claimed for 5,100 kilometres (worth €1,451). Searching his official diary for the month however, shows that Mr Quinn had only a single engagement outside of Dublin, when he spoke at the MacGill summer school in Co Donegal.

On six of the days that month, he was on an official visit to Chicago while a further seven days are either specifically marked “private” or simply left blank.

Calculating all of the mileage that was apparent from the diary comes to less than 1,000 kilometres of the total, making it impossible for the public or media to identify how the other 4,100kms were incurred.

Over the course of three weeks, a number of queries were submitted to Mr Quinn’s Department, the upshot of which was that the official diary does not account for all travel.

Subsequently, in radio interviews on Newstalk and RTE this week, Mr Quinn said that some of the mileage relates to other people, including civil servants and so on, traveling on his behalf.

Here is the lengthy story that I wrote based on the documents.

The diary and expense claims for the month can be found here:

At the very least, this shows an expense system that is badly in need of reform with simply no way of retrospectively checking how the mileage was incurred.

There are few, if any, private companies (or indeed public bodies) that would simply allow readings from an odometer to count for the purposes of paying out a not insignificant amount of money. Almost all would seek a detailed list of journeys conducted, their purpose, their date and so on. And when people talk of vouched expenses, that is the type of system they mean.

Vouched expenses does not mean a TD making a claim, then holding on to a receipt, with only a 10% possibility of being audited. Nor does it mean simply entering a round figure on an expense sheet without supporting documentation.

As I referred to last week I am publishing all Garda expense claims in all categories. Google spreadsheets can’t handle a 641,576 row database so I am using Socrata – the data is downloadable from there in a variety of formats.

The data contains anonymized individual expense claims for all Gardai over a 6.5 year period, totaling some €181,605,359.30*. The number of Gardai on the payroll in 2009 was approximately 17,000. The data was anonymized not because it was redacted but because it was the most effective way for the data to be released. Under the Criminal Assets Bureau Act, members of the force who are part of that Bureau cannot be named. In order to expedite the release of the data, I agreed that the column containing names of members of the Gardai generally could be removed – however this does not stop people from seeking it.

Some of the larger individual expense claims appear to be aggregated and relate specifically to the Corrib Gas project.

*Additionally I can’t speak much to the provenance of the data – or how it was exported – but it was from an Oracle system. Indeed there may be duplicate claims if the data was exported in a way related to ‘version history’ of claim. However it is often the case that multiple Gardai will be able to claim precisely the same amount under each category.

The Gardai are getting some press today for the amount spent – €14.5 million – on resources for the Corrib gas site. It is interesting to contextualise this figure. In total, Gardai travel and subsistence claims totaled €181,605,359.30 from 2004 to mid 2010.

I will publish the entire 641,576 row database shortly. It does not contain the name of any personnel.