Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 28 May 2015

Public Accounts Committee

2013 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 - Social Protection
Chapter 10 - Regularity of Social Welfare Payments
Chapter 11 - Control of Supplementary Welfare Allowances
Chapter 12 - Farm Assist
Social Insurance Fund 2013

10:00 am

Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

There is a whole range of smaller schemes which give rise to the cumulative figure. We have four surveys scheduled to start this year and I believe two or three of these would fall into that category. As I do not want to mislead the Deputy, I will ask him to bear with me for a moment. My advice is that this year we are talking about doing a fraud and error survey on the farm assist scheme, the free schemes such as the telephone, electricity and gas allowances - the household benefits - and carer's allowance, which is a bigger scheme but one which also falls within the parameters we talked about. These surveys are planned for this year. We are trying to mix and match to take account of the fact that some of the smaller schemes go unnoticed in a sense.