Róisín Shortall (Dublin North West, Labour)

The bottom line is that the Office of the Comptroller and Auditor General, which is a most respected office, has found that significant amounts of money have been overpaid by the Department and a small proportion of that has been detected. By any standards, that is a fairly poor performance by her Department. For example, in one of the schemes that has the highest fraud and overpayment rate, the one parent family payment, surveys suggest that in 2007, €67 million was overpaid yet the Department detected only €5 million of that. That cannot be a good performance. There is a concern that the Minister is not targeting those schemes most prone to fraud. Would the Minister agree, given the vast amounts of money involved and given the pressures on the Department's budget, that it makes sense to bring a much sharper focus to the area of overpayment and fraud, and for that reason to have far more frequent fraud and error surveys in which she would target those schemes most prone to fraud because she does not seem to be taking that approach?

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