IT costs the Isle of Man government just under £90 in staff time to answer each question asked in the Manx parliament - which means one MHK has incurred costs of almost £26,000.
Onchan MHK Peter Karran - who has asked a total of 291 questions in the House of Keys and Tynwald during the current political year - caused hundreds of hours of staff time to be used to provide information.
He asked 103 questions in Tynwald and 188 in the House of Keys - considerably more than any other politician. It equates to just under one third of all questions asked in Tynwald and more than half of all questions in the House of Keys.
The figures were released this afternoon in a written answer to a question from South Douglas MHK Bill Malarkey.
Statistics - produced by the Chief Secretary’s Office - showed that in one period of 12 weeks between February and April 2010, 220 parliamentary questions were answered which required 722 officer hours, an average of 3.28 hours per question.
However, the total number of questions answered between October 2010 and April this year were said to have cost the government a total of £62,242.
A statement from the Clerk of Tynwald’s Office said, “There are a large number of potential inaccuracies which would make the results open to dispute; Departments and Offices may not have correctly captured the amount of time spent in answering each question, the survey period may not have been representative of the amount of questions posed in other times in the parliamentary year, the questions posed during the survey period may have been more complex or more straightforward than the average.
“Members will appreciate the difficulties in estimating the average cost to Government in answering a question due to the varying nature of the complexity of the questions posed. Some questions can be answered relatively straightforwardly whilst other questions, often with numerous parts, require a large amount of research by officers to ascertain the information required for the answer.
“In addition it is important to take into account the opportunity cost in terms of officer’s time spent answering questions; this is the time that would have been spent by officers in their day to day duties had they not been researching information to answer the questions posed.”
