Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

I shall comment on a few of the points. I have no disagreement with any of the points made about ensuring the integrity of the register of electors. The committee may wish to get some information from the Department of Social Protection on its project for the development of a public services identity card. The project is under way and aims to provide an identity card for every citizen. The structure that will underpin the project, in terms of an individual identity number and the ability to link it with an image of a person, can be useful to the electoral register. There is probably scope, in the longer term, to synchronise the systems and even to have recognition in polling stations, etc., when people present their cards. The detail of that would be something that an electoral commission would negotiate with the Department. Even to understand the model might give the committee some idea about what it would recommend as ways forward in regard to that matter.

I referred to the conflict of interests in regard to the audit of an electoral commission. Under the Constitution it is my obligation, as Comptroller and Auditor General, to audit the accounts of all funds under the authority of the Oireachtas. Therefore, if funding is provided by the Oireachtas to an electoral commission then it would be expected that I would be the auditor of same. In order to ensure that I have independence, as the auditor, I cannot then be involved in decision-making about the application of funds. That is fundamentally the question.

The electoral commission, as envisaged, will be a spending body and there will be substantial funds going through same. The difference broadly between, let us say, SIPO or a referendum commission, is that there is normally a fairly small budget involved. In the case of SIPO it is a very small budget. There is also an Accounting Officer, separately, to account for that. Once one is the auditor who is tasked with reporting to Parliament, in regard to how resources are managed and applied, then it would not be consistent to be on the inside making the decisions and so on.

I was drawing a distinction between possibly putting a system in place with an Accounting Officer, where the commission would sit above the Accounting Officer level and would not necessarily be involved in the day-to-day resourcing decisions. A model could be crafted but when it comes down to performance and decisions being made about developing a major IT project to underpin voter registration and identification, I think it would be very difficult for someone on the commission also to be the auditor.

On the point about giving SIPO more teeth, I would certainly agree that we are not always in a position as a commission because we act within the law and within the parameters set down by Parliament.

On the point about spending limits, that refers to electoral spending where there are limits in place. There are strict rules around when the clock starts and stops ticking. It is generally recognised that there are ways of doing things early that give the impression of a campaign up and running and there is very little SIPO can do because it has to operate within the law as it stands. As to timelines, it depends on what one wants to do and what it is decided the electoral commission would achieve. Looking at the consultation paper, the experience elsewhere has been that this is a multi-year project. Any major IT project will be three to five years and that is generally the experience with large-scale projects. That timeline of three, four or five years is probably what one is looking at for a comprehensive shift and realignment of functions.