Fees and charges are the largest category of additional receipts that the NI Executive uses to finance its spending, on top of the finance from the UK Government. As such, the level of receipts from these sources are relevant to the long-term sustainability of the Executive's finances.
In our discussion of fees and charges in our Guide publication, we noted that some of these receipts come from within the public sector, where one part of government is paying another for specific goods and services. This causes a minor problem because including these internal receipts as ‘money in’ overstates the external financing of departmental spending.
When we published the Guide, we said we had not been able to systematically identify these internal payments. At that time we decided we would come back to this topic in future. This technical paper gives further detail on how we went about this work, and what we have discovered - i.e. that approximately a fifth of the fees and charges income is effectively transfers within the public sector, with the remaining four-fifths coming from external sources.