While an appeal is currently pending with the Information Commissioner in relation a request seeking an export of the entire financial management system in use at the Houses of the Oireachtas, the Oireachtas were kind enough to release a portion of the information sought. These databases contain the expense claims of staff at the House of the Oireachtas under three headings, Committee Travel, Interparliamentary Travel and Other staff Travel for 2004 to 2010, in about 15,000 rows.
These spreadsheets are published “as is”, with one exception. I have temporarily removed the column for date of the claim, because Google Spreadsheets seems to be having issues converting some of the cell dates, and is giving incorrect dates. I will fix this, and publish later.
Below you will see the decision letter which explains some of the column headings – please read this before you look at the spreadsheets as it contains important provisos and explanations.
Oireachtas Interparliamentary Travel staff expenses
Oireachtas Committee Travel staff expenses
Oireachtas Other staff travel expenses
The spreadsheets themselves are in need of cleaning (subtotals are included in the Amount column for example).
in the letter its says
“The description column in the spreadsheet includes descriptive words for each payment exactly as they do in the Integra records and, as they were entered by different operators only for approximate identification purposes, they are not uniform and may contain typographical errors and abbreviations.”
http://code.google.com/p/freebase-gridworks/ gridworks cleans up spreadsheets quite cleverly, trying it now with this data works like a charm
i’d recommend to you and the oireachtas finance info management guys