Although RCI is official once published by DFHERIS, the dates of its implementation depend entirely on the entities, organisations or individuals that decide to use it. However, DFHERIS requires RCI to be used for the annual R&D Budget Survey (which presents the data on the government R&D Budget and on Ireland’s R&D expenditure across all sectors) and the biennial Higher Education R&D Survey (which captures expenditure and human resources devoted to research activity in the Irish higher education sector). Both of these surveys result in statistics that are communicated to the Central Statistics Office, Eurostat and OECD for international publication and benchmarking, which underlines the importance of accurate reporting.