Mr. John McKeon:

I covered some of this earlier on. In the first instance, we had to introduce the scheme quickly. We had to work on the presumption of honesty. That created the risk of extra payments. I formally recorded and communicated that fact to the Minister and to the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform. I copied that to the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General at the time. However, it was decided to accept that risk, given the greater good of supporting people during what was an unprecedented time. At this point, all payments of the pandemic unemployment payment are checked against the Revenue Commissioners, both at claim stage and during an ongoing payment stage. Throughout the past year and bit, or 21 months, we have undertaken a number of control activities. Our special investigations unit has undertaken a number of control reviews. We have run certification programmes and projects. We have had the employer reporting line and we have had recertification. As a consequence of those checks, we stopped approximately 140,000 claims in payment. On the take on checks, we received approximately 1.8 million claims and we only paid 1.3 million claims. To give people reassurance, there was already a check there. On the next steps, as I said, our staff are currently supporting this system and the scheme. They will be diverted to review all claims that were paid to see if there were any overlaps between payment and employment, particularly on the self-employment side. This will happen over the coming year to raise any over-payments that are necessary to raise and to recover those payments.