Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 18 January 2024
Public Accounts Committee
Appropriation Accounts 2022
Vote 37 - Social Protection
Social Insurance Fund 2022
Report on the Accounts of the Public Services 2022
Chapter 13 - Regularity of Social Welfare Payments
Chapter 14 - Ex gratia Payments of €1.4 million to Social Welfare Branch Managers
Chapter 15 - Raising Social Welfare Overpayments
Chapter 16 - Recovery of Welfare Overpayments
Chapter 17 - Actuarial Review of the Social Insurance Fund
9:30 am
Mr. John McKeon:
The issue would be identifying them. We do respond. As I said, we set up the employment status investigation unit whereby we are particularly targeting sectors where we think there might be an issue. However, if you look at the number of people who are self-employed in the economy and the issue of the numbers, there are, for example, currently 235,000 people who are self-employed with no employee, in other words, own-account, self-employed people. We cannot go through 235,000 cases. The determination of employment involves the employer part and the worker part. Quite often they have different views. Sometimes they have the same view. Sometimes, if they have the same view, it is the contrary view to the Department's. We have to target our resources. We have 18 full-time inspectors and we are targeting our resources. If anybody comes to us, we will absolutely look at the case but we have to take a targeted approach. It should be borne in mind as well that when you look at the sectors of employment, about 60,000 of those 235,000 people are farmers. Another 17,000 are in transport, mainly taxi drivers. We are not going to investigate farmers or taxi drivers. They are clearly self-employed. We go after other sectors. We will do that but there will not be a big hit. If people want to come to us, we will certainly review their cases, but we are going after occupations-----