Mr. John McKeon:

I will come back to that point, but on the specific issue of what the Deputy said about whether we give customers the benefit of the doubt, we operate within the law. The law is very clear that we must be absolutely certain before we pursue a case for fraud that the customer deliberately, knowingly and wilfully withheld the information. It is important also to understand from a customer perspective that the schemes are very complex. Many of our schemes have complex rules and conditions and many customers genuinely would not be aware, if their means change, what the extent of the change needs to be before they need to tell us. In the Department we have a job to do in informing and communicating to customers that if their means change they need to tell us.

I noted in my opening statement that there was a particularly high level of fraud and error in respect of farm assist. We are looking at a small number of farmers; I think 6,000 to 7,000 farmers, there or thereabouts, claim farm assist. They are small farmers. Their income is very variable. Because it is their net income, it depends on input prices and output prices. Their income varies a lot over the year. It is understandable that in that situation a farmer facing such variability in income would have difficulties in figuring out whether this means he or she needs to have a change in his or her payment or not, particularly during the years in question where there were significant changes to the single farm payment and where the Department's means rules were changed. Instead of 70% of farm income being assessable, it was changed during the period of this review to 100%. Unless farmers are reading the newspapers and watching the Dáil debates very carefully, they will not necessarily have copped that it is not 70% any more but 100%. These are the factors that have to be taken account and which we have to understand.