Mr. John McKeon:

That is unfair, to be honest. I will give an example. PPS numbers always required an identity check regardless of the SAFE process. Since the SAFE process was introduced, we have issued approximately 1 million of them, predominantly to new people coming into the State who do not have any identity with the Department. We have always looked for documentary evidence such as birth certificates, passports or bank statements. Irish people receive a PPS number at birth and the first time we come across them is when they make a claim. Any time anybody made a new claim we always checked the identity. Until the mid to late 1990s in many cases, we sent a social welfare inspector to the home. We always incurred costs on identity.

I did not include the cost of sending social welfare inspectors to anyone's home. I looked purely at using the process we were using for identity checks prior to the introduction of SAFE and how much it would have cost to keep doing it when issuing social services cards, pensions books and free travel passes. At a conservative estimate, that cost would have come to between €30 million and €31 million. The actual net additional cost is approximately €37 million and that is genuine and sincere. I acknowledge that the committee would expect, like Mandy Rice-Davies, that I would say that anyway but I was not involved. I was not even in the Department at that stage and I was not in the Civil Service. I was made Secretary General of the Department in 2017, the same year as this whole thing broke. The easiest thing for me would have been to say there was a new broom, that everything until then had been wrong and that I was going to fix it. I genuinely looked at the situation and the net cost is approximately €37 million at most, in a conservative estimate. As I said in my opening statement, I am quite happy and I do intend to commission an external cost-benefit analysis next year. I understand the Mandy Rice-Davies-type argument that I would say that anyway. We will do that and publish it.

The benefits break into two themes. One is administrative efficiencies in the Department, including the online cases I mentioned.