Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

No, there are two different matters. Control savings are payments that would have arisen had an intervention not occurred. An intervention stops something, such as the continuation of a claim or a claim being put in payment or matching information that changes what people are entitled to. Some of that is fraud, some is error and some is people not declaring changes in circumstances. They may have forgotten or deliberately omitted to do so. When we talk about control savings, we are not necessarily talking about attributing a specific amount to fraud.

We then have to look at the particular cases to see whether what gave rise to them was fraudulent or Department error.