Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

As the Deputy can imagine, the computer systems in the Department are extremely sophisticated and complicated in servicing 70 schemes with different eligibility requirements and providing for 87 million payments in a way which can be tracked and accounted for on an annual basis. In developing our computer platform we must be careful to ensure we do not create problems in terms of business continuity and that we do not risk making so many changes at a particular point in time that the fundamental role of the Department would be undermined and payments would not be made.

Having said all this, the Deputy might appreciate that over time we have had systems developed to service and support various areas of activity as the Department's activities have expanded and the profile and the way in which payments are made have changed. We have been undertaking a programme to modernise our computer systems for approximately six or seven years and it represents a significant investment by the State. Our overall approach, in the first instance, was to modernise and have the most sophisticated systems in areas in which there was less risk and volatility. The first area we examined was that of pensions, which was followed by child benefit. We have been modernising our systems systematically and migrating schemes to our new platform. We have considerably multiplied the level of activity in this regard. The most recent movement to our systems involved schemes which were the source of so much discussion last year, namely, disability allowance, carer's allowance and invalidity pension. All of these schemes have now migrated to our new platform, which gives us much more integrated information and much better ways to manage the information and understand our customers.

We have always had data interaction with the Revenue Commissioners who collect PRSI on our behalf. This informs all of our client eligibility records. We host the client identity services and the personal public service numbers for the entire public service. On the back of this we are rolling out the public service card to customers in the first instance and potentially to other users of public services. We have systems in place which are very much at the height of sophistication and modernisation, but there is no doubt that, equally, we have schemes that we need to migrate. The most delicate of these are probably in the areas of greatest volatility such as those involving jobseekers, in respect of which there is movement in and out and approximately 900,000 or 1 million claims a year, as I mentioned to Deputy John Deasy. We have been examining ways in which to do this, while ensuring we can continue our business and yet progress. We have been taking a few approaches to this task. While we have invested hugely in developing our own systems, we have also received great support through e-government moneys because where we develop systems and a means of holding information which is potentially of value to the rest of the public service, the infrastructure put in place not only supports the core activity of the Department but it also supports agency services in other areas of the public service. Systems developed in this way include those for the birth, marriage and death records held by the General Register Office which are published to 50 agencies in the public service and have generated huge savings, particularly in the issuing of medical cards and in respect of Department of Social Protection schemes.

The other central area encompasses the identity service that I referenced which involves the public service card and validating PPS numbers. Several hundred thousand such validations are carried out every year for other agencies. Progress is being made and it is our database which supports what is known as the single customer view.

This would be pivotal to the next generation of public services in terms of other agencies being able to access and validate customer identity by being able to look at this customer view. More recently, we have developed a system to capture means data, so when we capture data for the purpose of means assessment, we are working towards developing a system to allow that data be shared with other public bodies. In other words, if people declare means to us and we validate and capture it, we would be able to share it with other public service providers where means assessment is carried out. That potentially has much value in other spaces, such as housing, education or health services.