John Curran (Dublin Mid West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

The awareness campaign, where 10,000 people went to the website and then some of those engaged further, should set off alarm bells because people are not prepared to report their own situation for fear of losing their employment or work. That should be heard loud and clear.

The officials indicated the number of inspections that were carried out and their financial yield. There are particular areas on which I would like more detail. From what we have heard, there are two types of inspections, those the Department does on its own and those it does jointly with Revenue or the Workplace Relations Commission, WRC. What are the criteria around these? How are these decided or determined? Are they purely random or are they evidence-based targeted inspections? What is that programme? Is it geographic or sectoral? The committee does not have this information but the Department has been carrying these out for some time. Surely the information it gets from one year to the next informs decision-making about where those inspections will be carried out, for instance if there was a particular yield in construction within a geographical area. Revenue does exactly that with targeted audits, as well as random ones, each year. Should the Department not do the same with its inspections? There could be a set number of inspections from which is derived the information about numbers determined to have had bogus self-employment contracts.