Mr. John McKeon:

Generally, the scheme-specific risks that the Comptroller and Auditor General refers to are in schemes where there is a means test or complex eligibility criteria. Before I mention the pandemic unemployment payment, the scheme which has the highest level of hours is the farm assist payment. It is a small scheme but the conditionality and means test are quite complex for the farm assist scheme. I often wonder how any farmer could possibly get the claim right since it is quite complex in many respects. Schemes that have complex conditionality, particularly relating to means tests since a person's means might change over the course of a year, are the main risks.

The main risk with the pandemic unemployment payment is its sheer scale.

Normally we take two to three weeks to process a normal jobseeker's claim, and that is a clean jobseeker's claim. We have processed 1.5 million claims in less than a week. I mentioned in the statement of internal financial control that as a Department, we had to prioritise getting payments out over implementing control checks.