Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

For people who are on the increase for qualified adult, IQA, and who are long-standing pensioners, the Department is not writing to them and asking them. That is something I always check when they come in under the IQA, whether they had stamps of their own and could get the carer's credit. That is not what the Department is writing out to people about. It is doing an update, a needs assessment. If people had been warned and been told then what they have been told now they would not have gotten caught; legitimately not, there is no cheating here. It is quite simple. If someone puts €110,000 in a joint account the person on the IQA begins to lose - the threshold is approximately €55,000 each - whereas if the person who earned the money just used their money and put it in a separate bank account of their own and just put enough money in the joint account to keep afloat, they would then never get caught. People were never told that and now the Department is coming after them and cleaning them.