Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

-----an employer is competing with a business down the street which is employing people under the counter and in the shadow economy, that business has to compete against a business with an unfair advantage over a legitimate employer. There has to be some honesty in this regard. I repeat that the vast majority of people who have social welfare income support of any kind are paid exactly what they are entitled to, no more and no less. Thankfully, the vast majority of people are utterly honest. Does this mean that we should ignore people who are scamming or abusing the system? We have to maintain confidence in the system so that if people are scamming the system they are targeted. I put it to Deputy Daly that the best way to target fraud and abuse is to use good intelligence in order to identify high risk areas where there has been an identifiable risk of wrong. Ultimately, as the Department and the Revenue Commissioners roll out improvements in computer systems and the personal services card, we will be able to do a lot more checking and verification of identity at the point where people collect payments. We will also be able to match data so that if there is something ontoward, say, for instance it turns out that there are perhaps ten households claiming a payment of some kind from one address, this would suggest a possible audit would be required. This is modern auditing.

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