Mr. John McKeon:

As a general comment, there are two figures in that chapter. There is an overall figure for excess payments on invalidity pensions, which is 1.5%, and that is from a survey from 2015. We are trying to target our annual reviews carefully at cases where we think issues may be arising. There is one way to look at the 68%. We are either targeting very well, or that figure may be an indication of a bigger problem. The survey results from 2015, and invalidity pensions will be surveyed again soon, indicate there is not a problem with invalidity pensions because, as the Deputy said, they are contribution based.

Issues do arise with invalidity pension schemes. For example, people might have issues regarding whether they are working even though they are claiming an invalidity pension payment. Qualified adult increases are means tested on the invalidity pension scheme, so there can be issues with such cases where a person's means may have changed but he or she has not updated the Department. We use data analytics and make use of information that we get in our control surveys, for example. I refer to the characteristics of the types of cases where there might be an error. We use that data to target our control reviews. My take on the Deputy's question is that we probably target the invalidity pension control reviews quite well.