Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

In one sense, the position on giving people an option as to their payment mechanism changed in 2008 or 2009 or thereabouts. At that point, the Department took a view that electronic funds transfer, EFT, no longer would be an option for those payments that were considered to be riskier and that people would be required to take their payment through An Post. This was particularly in the context of jobseeker payments. Part of the reason was that there was greater assurance with regard to the presence of the individual in the country, and there was the potential for better identity checks. The payments that go to people via EFT primarily tend to be what would be considered low-risk payments. More often than not, they are pensions - that is, contributory State pensions - child benefit in many but not all cases, disability payments and invalidity payments. More recently, certainly over the past five or six years, we have moved a lot of illness benefit customers into EFT on the basis that most of those people have an attachment to the workforce. Again, it is to do with the risk of their presence or otherwise.