Mr. John McKeon:

Briefly, real-time data information is made available in respect of employees by the Revenue Commissioners and I will return to that point. That data information is not available for the self-employed. We are only now getting in the self-employed returns for 2020; we only got them in November. We will go back and review all self-employed claims against those records to identify overpayments. We have approximately 200 staff who are currently engaged on maintaining the PUP. The detail may be online but a great deal of manual processing is involved. As the scheme transitions, we will keep those staff in place and they will be involved in a control project to identify overpayments that happen. We will follow up on those and pay particular attention to the self- employed group.

Regarding the employee group, there were some difficulties at the start of the process using the real-time look-up information facility in the way it was suggested, which is the way we are using it now. The first issue was that IT system we developed, which we did in four days, did not have direct links to Revenue, which it could not have had. We subsequently rebuilt it on our core platforms and that took a period of time. The second issue was that the real-time look-up agreement we had with Revenue prior to the pandemic was a single case by case look-up facility for data minimisation reasons. An officer had to manually type in a PPSN and get feedback on it. There was no mass or batch look-up facility. We had to put in place a new data sharing agreement with Revenue. The third constraint with our getting to grips with it was that it was a relatively new system at that stage. The terms and conditions for being eligible for the PUP was that a person had to be unemployed in the week prior to 13 March as the scheme was rolled out. When employers submit returns even with the real-time information facility, let me put it this way, they are not necessarily 100% accurate.