Martin Cullen (Waterford, Fianna Fail)

My Department is committed to providing a quality service for all of its customers. Claims and applications are processed and decisions on entitlement issued as quickly as possible, having regard to the eligibility conditions which apply and the available resources.

The State pension transition, SPT, and State pension contributory, SPC, schemes, which are insurance based schemes, require those eligible to reach a certain standard in terms of the social insurance contributions paid or credited on their record. The customer base is 239,000 with an annual intake of 36,000 claims. These customers predominantly reside within the State but approximately 14% are paid abroad.

Some difficulties occurred during the months prior to May this year with regard to the processing of State pension transition and State pension contributory claims. In April there was a backlog of approximately 9,200 new claims for SPT and SPC at various stages of processing. These were divided into 5,600 domestic and 3,600 foreign claims. By the end of August the domestic claims backlog was fully cleared and action was taken on all foreign claims. In all cases where delays occur customers do not lose payment as the determining date for pension payment used is the original date of receipt of the claim.

Social welfare entitlements requiring examination under EU or bilateral agreements take a longer time to process than domestic claims due to the need to obtain additional information from the customer which can often prove to be difficult and to exchange information with the other countries involved. Approximately 3,000 foreign claims await information from customers or foreign institutions. Reviews of the implementation of EU and bilateral arrangements, including the timely processing of requests for information, are carried out from time to time by officials of the Department and social insurance institutions in the other countries involved.

Delays in processing new claims occurred for a number of reasons, namely, an increase in the numbers of new claims received, the implementation in September 2006 of a number of scheme enhancements introduced in budget 2006, an unusually high level of staff turnover in the office in Sligo and delays which arose following the migration of the pensions system to a new computer system. As I stated, these have all been dealt with and all we await is information from other countries on foreign claims.

See this speech in context