Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)

We also co-operate with NERA on many of these inter-agency issues. However, we do not have a way of proving that an individual was working at a site for longer than he or she suggests. The saving on the control side comes from preventing that person from claiming in the future because he or she has on examination been discovered to have made an improper claim. There is no capacity in that case to prove fraud. In other cases, people have welcomed that the Department contacted them on, for example, the lone parent allowance because they had paid PRSI previously and they wanted to know that it was being properly spent on pensions, child benefit, etc.

If a recipient is no longer at the address he or she supplied to the Department, Deputy Fleming will be familiar with the basic auditing procedure of writing a letter to determine whether the payment should be discontinued. I am not saying that a significant number of people are acting this way, merely that there is a level of fraud in the system and it is important to implement measures to reduce it. If one is making payments to people which are no longer appropriate because of fraud or any other reason, one saves on future expenditure by discontinuing them. That is an internationally accepted measure.

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