Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

I thank the committee for allowing me to make a brief opening statement this morning. As well as examining the appropriation account for the Department of Social Protection and the Social Insurance Fund statutory account for 2011, I understand the committee wishes to examine three of the four chapters relevant to the Department that are included in the Comptroller and Auditor General’s annual report for 2011. As requested last week I provided the committee with an update on the conclusions contained in the three chapters, together with expenditure data from 2011 to date. I also have provided the committee with three separate reports on our implementation of the fraud initiative 2011-2013, the non-compliance analytics pilot project undertaken with Accenture consultants and the recently completed child benefit fraud and error survey.

As chapter 21 of the Comptroller and Auditor General’s annual report confirms, the Department of Social Protection spent almost €21 billion on welfare and employment schemes in 2011. As members will see from the material I have provided, the provisional outturn figure for 2012 is €20.7 billion. I and my colleagues in the Department are very aware of the responsibility we carry in ensuring the proper disbursement of such a significant proportion of Government income and expenditure. The Department has three main functions, namely, the delivery of income support, activation and control of fraud and abuse and in my view, it must maintain a balance between these in the conduct of its overall business. I wish to take the opportunity to comment briefly on each.

Delivery of income support was the traditional role of the Department and still is a vital one. It involves payments to approximately 2.2 million citizens, comprising approximately 1.4 million weekly and 600,000 monthly payments. We strive to make all these payments in a timely way, as delays can cause hardship and unnecessary concerns for vulnerable people. While the vast majority of claims and payments are processed on time, there are backlogs in certain schemes, as we discussed last year. I can now report that good progress is being made and that the backlogs have been almost eliminated in the case of invalidity pension and will be eliminated by end-March for family income supplement and carer’s allowance and by end-June for disability allowance. In the social welfare appeals office, the chief appeals officer has also made significant progress and the number of appeals to be finalised through her office will be increased substantially again this year. It should be noted that the elimination of backlogs in scheme areas also will have a positive knock-on impact on processing times in the appeals office.

I will turn to activation and Intreo. Pathways to Work provided for the establishment of an integrated employment and income support service. The integration of three previously separate services, namely, the Department of Social Protection, FÁS and the community welfare service, is in line with international best practice. This new service model includes the provision of an integrated service centre, that is, Intreo, a single point of contact for clients where they can come for benefit and employment services, the profiling of clients to help develop an individual progression plan, that is, a pathway back to employment and a group engagement process in which clients with similar profiles receive a briefing on the options and supports available to them.

It also includes a follow-up series of one-to-one meetings between clients and employment advisors; a closer engagement between Department local offices and their corresponding vocational education-skills training agency to improve the planning and scheduling of courses for unemployed people; formalisation of the concept of rights and responsibilities in a social contract - a record of mutual commitments; more intensive engagement with employers in order to encourage and facilitate the recruitment of people from the live register - this is a vital part of the new service and there has been some good progress to date; and, finally, greater targeting of activation places for long-term unemployed.

We have a demanding and challenging schedule of change with Intreo rolled out to ten offices last year and a target of another 33 this year with full completion by end 2014. I can assure the committee that the Department, with the assistance of other agencies, will be doing its best to make this happen. Turning to the control of fraud and abuse, I have provided material and reports in this regard. While the majority of people in receipt of social welfare payments are entitled to these, there is an onus on the Department to ensure that abuse is minimised and that resources are targeted at those who have an entitlement. We are examining ways of using data and information in a smarter way, as set out in the material we sent to the committee, while, of course, always being conscious of the requirements of data protection.

As regards debt management, the Comptroller and Auditor General made four recommendations in his chapter on welfare overpayments and in my update to the committee I have reported progress on all of them. Section 13 of the Social Welfare Act 2012 allows for deduction of an amount up to 15% of the weekly personal rate payable to customers for the purpose of recovering an overpayment. This equates to €28 per week in the case of customers receiving a weekly payment of €188. This is a significant advancement as previously we could deduct no more than €2 in many instances.

Our governance committee has approved the introduction of a new debt management system for the Department, which will be tendered for later this year. The recommendations of the Comptroller and Auditor General and his team will be incorporated into the specification for the new system.

We are continuing to develop our computer systems which reliably deliver 87 million payments per year. Although developed independently, mechanisms exist on our major systems whereby significant changes made to customer or claim details are automatically notified to other relevant systems. The Department is working towards consolidation on a single ICT platform - the business object model implementation, known as BOMi. This work is being carried out as part of the Department’s continuous service delivery modernisation, or SDM, programme. As this programme progresses, all of the Department’s client and claim-related systems will be integrated on the one platform, ensuring that all client and claim information is fully and automatically available across all of the Department’s schemes and places of business.

As a Department, we have completed our first year as a restructured and transformed DSP organisation with colleagues from a number of different organisations bringing their unique insights and experiences to the work. In this regard, the committee may wish to note that some 3,000 new people have joined the Department since 2009 which, while challenging from a HR, culture and training perspective, represents a huge opportunity for us in terms of different talents and skill-sets. While adapting to and meeting all the challenges, we remain focused on our three core objects of providing income support particularly to those most in need, providing activation and employment supports and ensuring our controls minimise incidents of fraud and error.