Government of Jersey

Purchase card allocation and usage (FOI)

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by States of Jersey and published on 26 September 2017.

Request

Please provide the number of States purchase cards currently in circulation with a breakdown by department.

Which States Members and civil servants currently have access to a States purchase card?

Please provide a breakdown of all that has been spent by civil servants, including the chief executive, on States purchase cards broken down per officer per year, for 2016 and so far in 2017.

How many civil servants within the past five years have been found to have misappropriated funds and how many have been sacked? Where possible, please provide as much detail about the amounts misappropriated, who was involved and which department they worked in.

How much has been deemed in total to have been spent inappropriately? How much of this has been recovered?

Response

See table below.

Department	Number of Cards as at July 2017	2016 (£)	Expenditure 2017 to date (£)	Total (£)
External Relations	7	-	5,188	5,188
Treasury & Resources	9	13,181	11,735	24,916
States Assembly	19	11,252	7,921	19,173
Chief Minister's Department	23	100,897	49,493	150,390
Economic Development	31	49,528	33,256	82,784
Environment	38	61,572	38,000	99,572
Non Ministerial	50	161,802	87,751	249,553
Community and Constitutional Affairs	89	222,265	148,561	370,826
Department for Infrastructure	202	322,241	214,283	536,524
Health & Social Services	262	895,948	687,969	1,583,917
Education Department	431	917,973	636,115	1,554,088
Social Security	13	12,950	8,943	21,893
Total	1174	2,769,609	1,929,216	4,698,825

Note:

1. The number of purchase cards per Department is as at July 2017.
2. The purchase card expenditure in 2016 and 2017 is expenditure by the Departments on purchase cards in these years. The number of purchase card will have varied over time with starters and leavers and also with structural changes to the States of Jersey.
3. Purchase card expenditure relates to Ministers and all States employees (not just civil servants).
4. Expenditure figures include GST / VAT. Any GST or VAT paid on the goods / services bought on the purchase card is included in the financial figures – it is not possible to split the data further.

B and C

A breakdown by department is provided in the table above. To provide any further breakdown is considered by the Authority to be exempt under Article 25 and Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 (the Law) in that it may allow the identification of personal data relating to individuals and will take longer than the 12.5 hours set out within the Law.

In the past five years no civil servants have been found to have misappropriated funds.

All expenditure on States purchase cards is authorised retrospectively in accordance with departmental schemes of delegation. Any non-business expenditure should be excluded from that authorisation and reimbursed. All expenditure included in the table above is therefore considered to be appropriate.

Exemptions applied

Article 25 - Personal information

(1) Information is absolutely exempt information if it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005.

(2) Information is absolutely exempt information if –

(a) it constitutes personal data of which the applicant is not the data subject as defined in the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005; and

(b) its supply to a member of the public would contravene any of the data protection principles, as defined in that Law.

Article 16 - A scheduled public authority may refuse to supply information if cost excessive

(1) A scheduled public authority that has been requested to supply information may refuse to supply the information if it estimates that the cost of doing so would exceed an amount determined in the manner prescribed by Regulations.4

(2) Despite paragraph (1), a scheduled public authority may still supply the information requested on payment to it of a fee determined by the authority in the manner prescribed by Regulations for the purposes of this Article.

(3) Regulations may provide that, in such circumstances as the Regulations prescribe, if two or more requests for information are made to a scheduled public authority –

(a) by one person; or

(b) by different persons who appear to the scheduled public authority to be acting in concert or in pursuance of a campaign,

the estimated cost of complying with any of the requests is to be taken to be the estimated total cost of complying with all of them.

Regulation 2 (1) of the Freedom of Information (Costs) (Jersey) Regulations 2014 allows an authority to refuse a request for information where the estimated cost of dealing with the request would exceed the specified amount of the cost limit of £500. This is the estimated cost of one person spending 12.5 working hours in determining whether the department holds the information, locating, retrieving and extracting the information.

For some departments the work to obtain the detailed breakdown requested of information could only be achieved by examining individual invoices and would require more than the 12.5 hours of work laid down by the legislation.