Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 1 December 2022

Public Accounts Committee

2021 Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 - Social Protection - Social Insurance Fund 2021
Chapter 10: Regularity of social welfare payments
Chapter 11: The recovery of benefit and assistance payments following compensation awards
Chapter 14: Classification of workers for PRSI purposes

9:30 am

Photo of Brian StanleyBrian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

The work placement experience programme was announced and began, as I understand it, in July 2020 and the planned implementation date was November 2020. Obviously, that was in the middle of the Covid pandemic. It provided for 10,000 work experience places over its lifetime, which I think was two years. It was for jobseekers and obviously they had to get employers to sponsor or host that. There was an estimate of €136 million over the two years. The final outturn was less than €1 million, or 0.6%, which is a very low rate of uptake of the scheme. The Estimate for the revised scheme for 2022 was down to €63 million.

We have received an advanced briefing from Mr. McKeon for which I thank him. The latest figures available to the end of September show an expenditure of €2 million. I have been looking at this over the past day or so. There seems to be a complete mismatch with 10,000 places provided for. How much roughly were the payments to employers planned to be? Was it based on a headage payment of a certain amount per worker? How is that calculated?

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