Mr. Seamus McCarthy:

It is an issue we discussed last week. I was drawing attention to a level of irregular payment in a number of significant schemes funded by the Social Insurance Fund. These include the State pension, contributory, and illness benefit in particular. The point is that the fraud and error surveys that the Department has undertaken indicate that there is a level of excess payment, whether it is due to error or to fraud, but that it does exist and I was simply drawing the committee's attention to that in the audit certificate. I am obliged to do that by law.