Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 29 November 2018

Public Accounts Committee

2017 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 - Social Protection
Chapter 11 - Regularity of Social Welfare Payments
Chapter 12 - JobPath Employment Activation Service
Chapter 13 - Actuarial Review of Social Insurance Fund
Chapter 14 - Overpayments of Age-Related Jobseeker's Allowance
Chapter 20 - PRSI Contributions by the Self-Employed
2017 Social Insurance Fund

9:00 am

Mr. John McKeon:

It is important to say it is sustained full-time employment. The other issue concerns the payment model. We pay the local employment services on an inputs basis. We pay them €20 million a year and they deal with 20,000 clients, which is approximately €1,000 per client that they look for from us. There is no visibility or accountability, however, regarding whether they get somebody into a job or whether that job is sustained. We did not want to do that under this model. We wanted to base payments on outcomes, but the question was how to define an outcome. We defined it as a person getting a job for at least 30 hours per week and it must be retained for at least 13 weeks.