Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 29 November 2018
Public Accounts Committee
2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 - Social Protection
Chapter 11 - Regularity of Social Welfare Payments
Chapter 12 - JobPath Employment Activation Service
Chapter 13 - Actuarial Review of Social Insurance Fund
Chapter 14 - Overpayments of Age-Related Jobseeker's Allowance
Chapter 20 - PRSI Contributions by the Self-Employed
2017 Social Insurance Fund
9:00 am
David Cullinane (Waterford, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source
If I could just come back on that, we have caveats here from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. They set out a number of caveats that might explain why the figures are higher in some areas. That explanation is not one of them. This breakdown colour co-ordinates each Department in terms of the numbers of staff. Mr. McKeon's is one of the bigger Departments, of 5,000 staff or more. It says there may be fluctuations in smaller organisations because of their nature. The bigger the organisation means there would be the full flavour of staff, in age, demographics, gender and so on. It should not be the case that those statistics are higher, if that is the case. This is according to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform.
It also says there might be an issue in the Department of Rural and Community Development because it was only established in 2017.
My point is that it is unacceptable for Mr. McKeon to say it is a result of how it is classified and that if it was done differently it would show a different outcome because it would show a different outcome for everyone. That caveat is not given to us here. I appreciate we have not been given an opportunity to delve into the figure, but I think we need to understand why the average amount of working days lost is 13. In the Irish Prison Service, the figure is 15.7. We can accept it might be higher in that area, given the nature of the job and that people get assaulted in the course of their work who would then be out. We can see obvious reasons for it to be higher in that area. Mr. McKeon's Department is the next highest, at 13 days. He said it was a concern but the explanation he gave does not really satisfy me. I am trying to figure out why there is a difficulty in his Department that does not seem to apply in other Departments. For example, in the Department of the Taoiseach, the figure is 3.5%. Some other big Departments are well under 10%, yet the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection is 13 days.
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