Mr. Tim Duggan:

The scope section had five deciding officers at the beginning of the year and it now has eight, so that is almost double. The new employment status investigation unit, which did not exist at all at the beginning of the year, has four inspectors right now. We are hoping to increase that to six before the end of the year. I have management board approval to extend it to 12 and perhaps 15 if the demand warrant that over the next while. There is quite a bit of work in setting it up because we need to train people in quite a complicated area of law. It takes a while to get somebody from being assigned to being productive in a unit like that but we are working on that. We are also leveraging the 350 social welfare inspectors who are deployed nationwide as part of this effort. Quite a lot of training and refamiliarisation with this area of law has been done during the year. More attention is being paid by social welfare inspectors on the ground to employer and PRSI inspections specifically.

It is fair to acknowledge that, over the course of the economic recession, social welfare inspection was concentrated on scheme-related issues rather than on this matter. We are now trying to restore balance. There were just over 2,000 employer investigations in 2018. Up to the end of October of this year, 2,745 were completed. Almost 1,000 others are under way. A few more will probably be initiated between October and the end of December. It will not quite be a doubling of the number of inspections but it will be close enough when we do the final figures after the end of the year.