Brian Stanley (Laois-Offaly, Sinn Fein)
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Reading the correspondence, it seems that the committee never looked for fine details of the status of any individual claim or investigation. The letter states:

By way of background the Committee will be aware that the Department does not normally comment in public or at committee on the status of any individual claim or investigation - whether that be in respect of an individual's entitlement to a benefit, a fraud investigation or an employer inspection.

The committee never looked for the details of any individual or any particular worker. The Secretary General states the Department has to respect confidentiality, and rightly so. We agree with Mr. McKeon on that, but he seems to be mistaken in that I certainly do not want to see a worker-by-worker account of what is happening in this investigation. I do welcome the fact that he goes on to state in the letter that:

I also advised that as all decisions of the inspectors will be retrospective in impact to the correct date without limitation as to time, all workers in respect of whom social insurance status might be modified will get the full benefit of that changed social insurance status notwithstanding that adherence to due process in the investigation may mean that it will take some time to reach any determination.

I suppose, in fairness, they are going back a long way. He goes on to state: "In addition, the Department will pursue recovery of any social welfare insurance contributions due for the full period where social welfare insurance status may have been misclassified." I welcome that because we want it clarified how far this would go back, for example, three years or five years. What the Department is saying here is there is no limitation. Whatever they deem to be the correct time that the wrong classification started, they can go back to that.

I take on board the Deputy's point regarding a timeline. It is a little vague. We should look for something more definite, but there is obviously a big piece of work being done here. Workers certainly will welcome that there is no limitation on how far they are going. The committee should look for a more definitive timeline.

I would request as well with the agreement of the committee that we would point out to them - I do not know if any other member of the committee was looking for it but I thought the committee had reached a consensus - that we were not looking for any individual's details. If I am wrong on that, I am open to correction.