Mr. John McKeon:

The Deputy referred to the level of fraud. Last year, the Department reported €99 million in overpayments, of which approximately €20 million related to fraud. To put that in context, it was a year with in or around €30 billion in payments. In the year to date, we are estimating that there has been €102 million in overpayments, of which €16 million relates to fraud. I do not want to overstate the level of fraud. So far, we have raised debts of between €20 million and €25 million in terms of the PUP and have recovered €10 million to €11 million of that. We have yet to implement some of the measures that we indicated we would and that the Comptroller and Auditor General referred to whereby we would review all of the claims and payments and try to match instances where people were working while also claiming PUP. Many of those instances would be genuine and not fraudulent. One of the issues that we as a Department need to face is that, under the law, people are meant to sign off a payment the first day they return to work. Often, though, they do not get their first pay cheques for four weeks. In the past, they may have sought the supplementary welfare allowance for that period. In such situations where there is a detected level of fraud because people are working and claiming, we must net off the amount they would have got from the supplementary welfare payment. This is something to be aware of.

I am afraid that we do not have figures on the international dimension. To a certain extent, it is a case of us not knowing what we do not know. We are not aware of a large amount of it, although it has undoubtedly happened. We took some control measures last year that resulted in approximately 9,000 claims – Mr. Conlon might correct me on that if I am wrong – being stopped where we identified that people were abroad. We have some data analytics. I do not want to describe them because I do not want to provide a rogue’s charter, but in many cases we have ways and means of detecting whether a payment is going abroad.