Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees

Thursday, 12 November 2020

Public Accounts Committee

2019 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 – Employment Affairs and Social Protection
Chapter 4 – Control over Welfare Payments

11:30 am

Mr. John McKeon:

Not yet. We expect to pay them in the next two to three weeks. There will be quite a large number. We have paid the PUP to about 850,000 or just under 900,000 people at some point over the period since March. We reckon we will have to pay somewhere in the region of 300,000 people some arrears payment. It might be one, two or three weeks of arrears. We are going through all of those cases and we plan to get them out and paid before the end of this month so that any arrears can be taken into account in the bonus payment, which will happen in the first week of December, so it will be in the next two or three weeks.