Shane Cassells (Meath West, Fianna Fail)
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Mr. McKeon is very welcome. As regards the fraud and error survey, both gross and net figures have been set out and the gross terms shows excess payment of potentially €460 million or nearly half a billion euro. In his concluding remarks he mentioned that a small number of people defraud the system. However, in the context of the spend, that is a significant amount of money considering the strain many Departments are under, in particular his own, and that people are trying to access payments that would make their lives easier to live. I ask him to set out the reasons for the variations across the schemes mentioned this morning.