Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

There is no overall level of fraud for the entire social welfare system. There are levels of fraud which are indicators. The fraud and error surveys to which the Comptroller and Auditor General referred and which are the subject of a chapter in his report are a snapshot of what is perceived to be the level of error or fraud in a particular scheme at a particular moment. They are designed to identify areas of risk to enable us to refine and develop our control policies to put in place new measures to try to deal with such things. The best estimate I can give of an absolute concrete figure is the level of overpayments the Department has identified, roughly 0.5% of total expenditure across all schemes.