Professor Mary Murphy:

The academic literature would suggest that the administration of welfare payments adds about 4% onto the welfare budget, which is about €20 billion, so a rough estimate of that cost could be €64 million. One could take it that the carers' allowance is more difficult to administer than the average payment because it is more intrusive so the cost would be greater. In the merging knowledge exercise for civil servants one aspect they looked at was what time would be saved for civil servants if the means test was taken away, what would be added if there were more stringent eligibility testing from the care and the medical side, and whether there would be some trade off there. Definitely, if one were to abolish the 4% of the means testing cost there would still be some eligibility administration costs in it for sure.