Independent research into the everyday architecture of administration.

About IOAS

The Irish Office for Administrative Simplification is an independent, non-governmental research initiative. It is interested in the ordinary architecture of administration: the forms, letters, hand-offs, verification steps, institutional boundaries and accumulated procedures through which people encounter public systems.

The Office begins from a deliberately cautious premise. Complexity is not necessarily bad, repetition is not necessarily duplication, and duplication is not necessarily waste. Administrative safeguards often exist for good reasons. The research question is whether those reasons remain clear and whether the same legitimate public purpose could sometimes be achieved with less total effort.

Particular attention is given to the citizen's experience across institutional boundaries. An individual organisation may see only its own procedure; the citizen experiences the whole journey. That difference of perspective lies behind much of the Office's work on citizen-mediated administration, Citizen Coordination Load, Administrative Absorptive Capacity and Administrative Orphan Points.

Antóin de Brún

Founder and Research Lead

Antóin de Brún founded IOAS from a long-standing interest in how institutions organise responsibility and how apparently modest administrative requirements accumulate when viewed from the citizen's side of the counter.

His interests lie particularly in the points where systems meet: where one organisation's process becomes another organisation's prerequisite; where information already known somewhere in the system has to be carried by the citizen; where a letter is technically accurate but does not tell its recipient what to do next; and where a case has a formal owner but nobody appears to own the next move.

The work is less concerned with finding fault than with understanding how complexity develops. Procedures usually accumulate for reasons. A safeguard is added, a new responsibility is created, a digital service replaces a paper one, or a boundary between organisations becomes necessary. Over time, however, the combined system may impose work that no single institution intended. IOAS is interested in making that hidden administrative work visible.

That interest has led to a simple recurring question across the programme: could the same public value be achieved with less total administrative effort?

Approach

IOAS distinguishes evidence from interpretation and recommendation. Its proposed concepts and methods are presented as research tools to be tested and refined, not as established official standards. The Office does not exercise statutory powers, speak on behalf of the Irish Government, or represent any Department, Minister or public body.