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:
It is decided by the Department in the case of JobPath and primarily by the Department in the case of the local employment service. If I take JobPath as the example, and the same model applies to the local employment services, we look at people who have been unemployed long term, which is 12 months or more, and we do a random selection of people and refer them to a case manager. In JobPath and the local employment service people have a personal adviser who works with them to prepare a personal progression plan and to help them to try to find a job or an appropriate training course. This is the concept. We refer people at random. The local employment service takes walk-in clients also. A person can walk into a local employment service, which then contacts us and we put the person on its caseload.