Mary Hanafin (Dún Laoghaire, Fianna Fail)

The prevention of fraud and errors in payments is an integral part of the day-to-day work of the Department of Social and Family Affairs. Through initial means testing of applicants, reviews of existing claims and targeted control activity in high risk schemes, we aim to ensure that the right person is paid the right amount of money at the right time.

Where people have been paid more than their entitlement, we seek to recover as much money as possible and have a policy of prosecuting those who have committed serious fraud.

On the Comptroller and Auditor General's report, while the Department of course shares his concern about ensuring that people only get what they are entitled to, we disagree with the methodology underpinning some of the analysis in the report. In particular, we believe that it is not appropriate to suggest that past overpayments should be in line with figures from the fraud and error surveys or that there would be such a similarity between figures for future savings and those for past overpayments.

When fraud or error is found in an individual claim, future savings will arise from the person having his or her payment reduced or stopped. However, it may not be possible for the Department to calculate or collect the value of any past overpayments to the individual concerned.

Often the effective date of a revised decision will be a current date, rather than a retrospective one, in which case no overpayment legally arises. For example, all medical reviews resulting in termination are made from a current date.

In other cases, the ability of the deciding officer to establish when exactly the claimant's entitlement ceased will depend on the circumstances of the individual claim. For example, if a person who has been claiming a jobseeker's payment is found, on review, to have been working and the Department can ascertain the period of that employment, then it should be possible to calculate the value of the overpayment involved. However, if a lone parent is caught cohabiting, the person's payment may be stopped, which would result in future savings, but it is difficult to ascertain when the cohabitation started and thereby compute the value of any past overpayment. Similarly, when a payment is terminated because the claimant has moved address and therefore failed to respond to letters sent to him or her, the deciding officer will not have the evidence to make a retrospective decision resulting in a recorded overpayment.

The Comptroller and Auditor General's analysis should be read with this caveat in mind. Nonetheless, I assure the Deputy that both preventing and recovering overpayments is a major priority for the Department and that we are determined to ensure that every euro of taxpayers' money is spent appropriately. To that end, we are not only doing our best to prevent payment errors at the initial application stage, but also targeting high risk schemes for frequent control activity.

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