Government of Jersey

States invoicing (FOI)

Produced by the Freedom of Information office
Authored by States of Jersey and published on 23 August 2018.

Request

Please can you provide me with the number of invoices paid with and without orders since 2015 to present?

Can you also provide details of the number of invoices paid with an order, where the order was raised after the invoice was received?

If possible can you break these figures down by department, and give reasons as to why the order was raised after the invoice was issued to the States of Jersey?

Response

The data contained in this response has been extracted from States of Jersey systems.

The number of invoices paid with and without orders are as follows;

Year	With orders	Without orders*	Un-known**	Total invoices paid
2015	84,878	102,635	8,100	195,613
2016	95,061	93,918	5,489	194,468
2017	104,502	84,167	1,590	190,259
2018 to date	56,424	43,049	663	100,136

*The States of Jersey has arrangements with a number of corporate suppliers where orders are not required. There are a high volume of invoices from corporate suppliers of electricity, water, telecoms, postal services and photocopiers that do not require orders. In addition, certain other payments are exempt from ordering including foster carer payments, university grants, back to work payments and long term care packages. Invoice payments that are exempt from ordering are subject to alternative authorisation / checking processes. During the course of answering this Freedom of Information request a random sample of over 4,000 invoices paid in May 2018 which did not have purchase orders associated with them were reviewed. In every case there was either a contract and / or exemption in place and / or an alternative authorisation process and no purchase order was required.

**Information unavailable as payments made on a paper system now replaced with an electronic system.

Year	Retrospective orders	Total invoices paid
2015	18,060	195,613
2016	18,099	194,468
2017	21,667	190,259
2018 to date	12,114	100,136

Departments	2015	2016	2017	2018 to date
Chief Ministers	324	203	292	186
CCA	2,863	3,014	2,638	1,170
EDSC	1,155	935	916	341
Education	3,679	4,660	7,034	3,906
Environment	408	398	452	235
HSSD	1,088	945	1,625	2,062
DFI	6,081	5,396	5,326	3,020
Social Security	0	214	784	195
Treasury	847	1,268	1,455	452
Non Ministerial	1,615	1,066	1,145	547
Total retrospective orders	18,060	18,099	21,667	12,114
Total invoices paid	195,613	194,468	190,259	100,136

It is not possible to give reasons as to why every order has been raised after the invoice date. The work to obtain the detailed breakdown requested could only be achieved by examining individual invoices and would require more than the 12.5 hours of work laid down by the legislation. Article 16 of the Freedom of Information (Jersey) Law 2011 has been applied.

Articles applied

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.

Regulations

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.