Where does your money go?

Have you ever wondered what happens when you pay taxes? Ever wonder when it disappears from your pay slip, where exactly it goes? I often do, indeed, I believe citizens have a right to see where it all goes.

This handy flowchart from the Department of Finance gives us an idea of exactly what happens our taxes, and indeed the money we borrow. I will make a clearer digital copy soon.


Justice briefing document – March 2011

I am just catching up with these fascinating documents, each of them released by various Departments. Essentially they are the briefing papers for incoming Ministers so they can understand the structure of their new brief. Unfortunately almost all of the them were uploaded as scanned documents, with little or no ability to search, and heavily redacted in parts (often with no justification).

Here are the Justice briefing papers, including some odd removals of the names of all the senior staff in the Department, but with no reference as to why they were removed (that I can find). I would assume there were security considerations, but this is not mentioned in the redactions table. The document has been OCRd.


Minister for the Environment diary 1998

As part of an ongoing process. The Ministerial diary of the Minister for the Environment Noel Dempsey for 1998 (the FOI Act came into force in April 1998).



Mary O'Dea and the IMF

I couldn’t let this one pass without comment either. Mary ‘shop around’ O’Dea has landed a new job at the IMF, as the Irish Independent reported earlier this month.

O’Dea, currently director general of financial operations at the Regulator, will become the IMF’s alternative executive director this July.

“I’m really looking forward to what I know will be a challenging role, especially at a time when Ireland is itself in an IMF/EU programme,” O’Dea told the Sunday Independent. This paper asked the Regulator two months ago if O’Dea would be taking up a new job in the IMF.

I suppose you could with some jest say that she is getting out of dodge when the going is good. Rumour has it there were no promotion prospects internally at the now expanding Central Bank, so she was bumped off to Washington. Apparently the job is a rather nice 3 years in Washington DC tax-free with expatriate benefits (including private schools).

Oddly though she goes from sitting in our Central Bank/Financial Regulator up to and during IMF intervention, to now sitting on the other side of the table to perhaps help scrutinise our adherence to an IMF deal.

(H/T P O Neill)

A city as a platform

Rachel Sterne, who had the good fortune to meet in New York last year, speaking about her new role as New York’s Chief Digital Officer. She is formerly of GroundReport and DayLife. I know there are some very good people in Dublin who want to replicate some, if not all, of this.

But how about go wild and make Ireland itself a platform?

Judge Kelly on Anglo and the ODCE

I couldn’t let this pass without putting it in full here (emphasis mine):

JUDGMENT of Mr. Justice Kelly delivered on the 10th day of May, 2011

Introduction

The collapse of Anglo Irish Bank Corporation Limited (Anglo) has had profound and serious consequences for the economic wellbeing of this State and its’ citizens. It has caused much hardship to many small shareholders who invested in it in good faith. It played no small part in seriously damaging Ireland’s business reputation throughout the world.

In such circumstances, one could reasonably expect that the relevant authorities in the State would carry out a comprehensive investigation so as to ascertain whether any breach or breaches of the criminal law might have occurred in respect of the activities of Anglo and those who were responsible for it.

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