Mr. John McKeon:

On the consultation with general practitioners, we have been in discussions with GPs and the Irish Medical Organisation on this changeover since 2016. As members will be aware, the Irish Medical Organisation is the only recognised body representing GPs that is affiliated with the Irish Congress of Trade Unions, ICTU and that has a negotiating licence. It has been public policy dating back to the 1970s that we should deal only with people who have formal recognition, but we did have some contact with the National Association of General Practitioners, NAGP. We did have some contact with it, but obviously communications and contacts on this were with the primary body, the Irish Medical Organisation. We had agreed with the IMO to implement the change in August. The organisation wrote to its members on 10 July advising them that the change was happening and encouraging them to co-operate in this regard. That said, the other organisation did not agree with this approach and publicly stated that doctors should not co-operate with it, and this caused confusion among GPs. We have had a number of meetings with the IMO over recent months and currently 75% of certificates are in the new form.

We should, perhaps, have done more to engage with the NAGP but we were in a somewhat difficult situation in that it is not recognised, it does not have a negotiating licence, it is not affiliated with ICTU, and we would also have been the meat in the sandwich between two rival organisations. Therefore, we followed the line of all public sector organisations and we dealt only with the appropriate representative body. This did cause us difficulties.

The other issue that arose was with regard to the overpayments. This dates back to the decision we took to auto-certify people because many of the old form certificates could not be processed efficiently under the new system.

We ask all people in receipt of this benefit to submit a final certificate to us. We processed all final certificates. We did not know whether the balance that we had not processed involved cases in which the person was no longer ill or whether he or she was caught up in this issue of GPs submitting old forms. The decision we took was to pay people where a final certificate was not submitted, knowing that in some cases this would generate an overpayment. We will not go chasing those people in any insensitive way. We have a project set up and we propose to recover those overpayments next year in a managed and sensitive way.

If there are examples of the community welfare service not operating in the way it should, I ask Deputies to send them to me. We issued a direction very early on that the community welfare service should support people with illness benefit. Some of the examples that have come to me - and I am not by any means saying this is the case generally - have been of people who presented to a community welfare officer, who told them they had received their payments. The claimant might not have perceived it that way but it could be seen that they had received payment and then there was no gap. In other cases there have been gaps and perhaps the community welfare service has not responded as appropriate. All through this period, however, the community welfare service has been supporting approximately 3,000 people a week with illness benefit interim payments, which is proportionate to the number of people affected. I ask the Deputies to send any examples directly to my office and we will investigate and deal with them. With some of these issues, it is only when one works through an individual example that one can see a flaw or gap of which we may not have been aware. If there is an issue we are not picking up, we will rectify it immediately, as I said in my opening statement. The directive has been given, though.

Two issues arise regarding arrears payments. One is what we call overlaps and the other is arrears. I will deal with the issue of overlaps first. It arises where someone gets a supplementary welfare allowance, a community welfare services officer payment, in lieu of his or her illness benefit payment. When we bring the illness benefit payment up to date, as we have now done, it will offset the amount due on illness benefit against the amount paid, so the customer will get a reduced payment. This has been the source of some confusion because people think they are owed five weeks' illness benefit but only get this amount and we must explain to them that they also got this other amount during that five-week period so we have netted it off. That is the issue of overlapping payments. As for arrears, where people were not paid at all, the arrears payments in most cases have issued and we are running a routine this week to pick up any subsequent arrears that have not been paid. They should be paid very shortly.

A question was raised about people still not in payment. We are satisfied that payment levels are back to normal. As I said in my opening statement, there will always be cases in which people are not in payment for one reason or another. I have gone through a number of the examples myself because I get many calls and queries directly into my office as well. In most cases - I will not say in every case - there are genuine problems. The people involved would not have got paid under the old system and there are problems that need to be sorted. I will give the committee an example I received this week. It concerned a person who thought they had been certified for a month but the doctor, instead of writing "26 September to 3 November", had written "26 September to 3 September". They had written the wrong date on the system. We did not know that the person was expecting a payment for a month but we could only operate on the basis of the certificate. We fixed it, but these are the issues which normally come to us via our phone line and which would normally be dealt with and fixed over the phone. People were caught up, however, and, as the Deputy said, unable to get through to the phone to sort out these issues. For information, we process 9,000 certificates a day, so even if we were to achieve 99% perfection, which would be extremely high in this type of operation - most analogous operations would aim for 95% - there would be a few hundred a day that for one reason or another would not flow perfectly. This has always been the case. Even in the best of days under the old system, we always used to receive 2,000 calls a day from people and, as I said, they would be sorted out. The issue this time is that we have received many more calls and, going back to the issue of operation, people are now missing payments for potentially legitimate reasons when one looks at the circumstances. It is a question of our being able sort them out quickly. We do not believe the current payment issues concern the system change; they concern the fallout from it in terms of getting back on top of all the phone calls and all the routine issues. Again, I encourage Deputies who may have individual examples to send them to me because I am very concerned that if there are any underlying systematic issues which we have not picked up at this stage, I identify and fix them. We have spent days and nights and weekends at this, however, so we are pretty confident we are back to normal operations, other than the clean-up. There are people caught up in the clean-up.

I fully accept what everyone has said about the communication on this. It has been poor. Most people on illness payment are on it for a short period, so we would have been writing out to all of them in advance, knowing that 70% of them would not be illness benefit customers by the time they received the letter. I fully accept that this was a bad call, however. We should have written out to customers regardless when the split payment issue occurred because of the autocertification and explained to them that while they may have got a payment of €165 and a payment of €33, if one adds them together, they make €198. We should also have explained that they are paid up to a certain date and that this problem will continue and, therefore, we should have asked them to try to get their certificates in as early as possible in the week because we are now on a current-week basis. Many people on continuous payment knew that payment was in arrears and that they had a seven-day buffer to get their certificates in. This disappeared for them and we should have communicated that. I fully accept that.

We tested this system in exactly the same way as we have tested all our other systems: in a way that works successfully for us in every other system change we have made. As I said, we have moved 1.3 million payments - pensions, child benefit, maternity and paternity benefits and treatment benefit - onto this system and have not had this incident before. We followed exactly the same testing routine. When trialling it, we also ran existing certificates that were in payment through the system to see whether it paid them, and it did. We launched an early implementation of it in respect of the partial capacity benefit programme, which is an analogous programme. This worked well. I could go into the reasons I think this training did not work but, if I may ask the indulgence of the committee, I point out that we have commissioned the independent review. I do not want to be seen to prejudice what the person carrying out the review will find. If I say what I think, I might be seen to be leading him. I think there were issues with the testing, from which I think we will learn, but I do not want to say something and then we see the independent review was not as independent as it should have been.

We could and should have done better on staff training. Our staff has made this point very strongly to us. Again, the training delivered to staff was the same as the training delivered in respect of every other scheme. It may have been Deputy Joan Collins but someone asked whether we planned for things going wrong. I suppose that in reality we did not. We planned for things to go right. Normally, for the people involved, if a systems change is carried out and the implementation works well and staff then have sufficient training, they then develop confidence in the system and its real-life application. However, when staff are suddenly hit with large numbers of calls, one cannot, having gone live, get confidence in the system. One of the learnings from this is to plan for failure rather than success. If there were ever an example of learning more from one's mistakes than one's successes, this is it. Our successes on the other schemes may have led to a level of complacency that there would not be a failure, and I put my hands up on that.

A point was raised about doctors charging people for certificates. We pay the doctors, so it is very clear that they should not be charging people for certificates. Doctors who are doing so are pulling a fast one. I do not believe the practice is widespread.

I was asked whether we wrote to everyone to apologise. I think I did so about two and a half or three weeks ago.

I explained what had happened as best I could in a letter, albeit one could obviously not send a letter of the length of my opening statement. I pointed to the availability of the community welfare service. I will not say I am happy to do so again in that one is never happy in this situation. However, if people feel it would be appropriate to draft another letter, I am absolutely prepared to do so.

I was asked about plans for other payments. The members can be assured that we will be taking these steps very seriously. At this point, the main payments which are not on the system are jobseekers' payments and lone-parent payments. We will be approaching these very carefully. As I said, there are 55,000 people on the illness benefit scheme whereas those other two schemes have many more participants. If there is a silver lining in this, it is that at least we learned our lessons in some respects. I am not trying to mitigate the impact but if we had affected lone parents or jobseekers, the numbers - and this is purely about the numbers rather than individual circumstances - would have been of a whole different order of magnitude. We will definitely take on board the lessons from this to ensure those implementations go properly.