Ms Niamh O'Donoghue:

There are a number of different things. First, the Department receives a lot of data from other organisations and cross-matches data with other organisations with a view to ensuring that people have the proper entitlements. For example, we have regular nightly feeds from Revenue in relation to the commencement of employment data to make sure that where people are legitimately working that they are not also receiving a social welfare payment to which they are not entitled. Data matching is a huge piece of that control activity for us. In addition, we have, all told, somewhere in the region of 1,100 staff working in control activity from inspectors to the special investigation unit, SIU, to people working in control activity at different scheme levels, all focused on trying to ensure that we minimise problems that might otherwise occur.

I mentioned to Deputy Madigan that the focus of the SIU is very much on the shadow economy, identity fraud and things like that. We operate on a joint basis with other agencies, Revenue, and the National Employment Rights Authority, NERA. Deputy Connolly was not impressed with the coverage of the multi-vehicle checkpoints but they-----