Paul McAuliffe (Dublin North West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I wish to move on to the issue of PUP payments. I do not want to dwell on it because extraordinary work was done over that period. I thought it was worth bringing to the committee’s attention, and there may be follow-up questions on this, the results of the testing sample for the PUP period. Some 411 claims were processed, of which 329 were employees and 82 were self-employed. While the irregular payments made to employees was approximately 9%, which is a little but not substantially higher than the irregular payments under other schemes, it is interesting it was not possible for the 82% or 100% of those who were self-employed to identify whether they were eligible. In short time Mr. McKeon has available to respond to me and other speakers, will he outline why the measures adopted in August were not adopted earlier and whether that was even possible? Why did the Department not make better use of the data made available by the Revenue Commissioners?