Aengus Ó Snodaigh (Dublin South Central, Sinn Fein) | Oireachtas source

I take this opportunity to thank all the Deputies who contributed. This has been a useful exercise, as it always is when we put our minds together without the argy-bargy that sometimes comes with some of the debates in the House, and helpful in examining the issues. Some constructive points were made and I will address them. Deputies Ellis, O'Dea, Terence Flanagan, Joan Collins, Boyd Barrett, Stanley, Durkan and Feighan and the Minister of State, Deputy Costello, and the Minister for Social Protection, Deputy Joan Burton, have all contributed to the debate. It is a useful system for those of us in the opposition. All Deputies can put time and effort into a proposal and present it to the House and have it debated in this way.

I wish to thank some others, go háirithe mo comhairleoir parlaiminte Miriam Murphy, atá ar sos mháithreachais. Is mór an trua nach raibh sí anseo chun éisteach leis an díospóireacht mar rinne sí a lán den obair sa chúlra. I also wish to thank the library service. When I first began work on the Bill I carried out a quick search but I did not come up with even half of what the staff there managed to produce as examples from other countries. This system has not been used as frequently as I had thought. The state of Colorado had an amnesty and recently the state New South Wales had an amnesty relating to rent reviews. We have heard mention of the amnesties in this State and I will refer to them. Although amnesties have not worked in other jurisdictions most of them have been of a different format to my proposal and it does not mean we should not try it.

Initially when I thought of the idea, we put together the heads of the Bill and circulated them to many organisations and asked for observations. The comments we got back were constructive. In particular, those from the Irish National Organisation of the Unemployed, INOU, and the Free Legal Aid Centres, FLAC, were supportive, but they had some concerns.

It is the sort of thing that is usually thrashed out on Committee Stage, which is why I have always urged Ministers to allow it to go before a committee where it can be examined and changed if necessary. That does not seem to be on the table today.

Many people find themselves in stressful circumstances having become aware of an overpayment. They are afraid to put up their hand and face a debt of perhaps €1,000 or €2,000 which it would be too much for them to meet from their weekly payment. They take a chance and continue in that position in the hope that the Department will never find out. In many cases, the Department does not find out or, where it does, cannot identify when an overpayment occurred. We could consider how an amnesty could differentiate between those who deliberately defraud the State and those who are caught up in error. It is a difficult concept, with which the Department is even now finding it hard to deal. I propose a short, sharp amnesty lasting a month followed by a greater crack-down.

I acknowledge the work of the Department's fraud initiative and have asked in the past that more social welfare inspectors be deployed. It has been shown that it is cost-effective to allocate more social welfare inspectors because the money comes back to the Department. If the Minister is not willing to go down the road of an amnesty, I urge her to deploy more inspectors. The overpayments represent taxpayers' money which, if it were in the social welfare pot, would be redirected to those most in need. It is a pity that the opportunity has not been taken to make the Bill part of a whole package of fraud initiatives. A short amnesty initiative for a month could be followed up by the belt-and-braces approach to those who are deliberately defrauding the State with the fraud initiative, social welfare inspections and the courts. Notwithstanding that, there are those who would be caught up in the net who are not involved in deliberate fraud. To be fair to the Department, it has often looked at those people sympathetically, but on other occasions it has not. Often the latter cases are the ones which are notified to Deputies and we end up arguing the case for a reduced payment for those people. While the Department is technically entitled to recover money at a rate of €2 per week, it has often persuaded or cajoled people to make repayments at an accelerated rate.

The primary aim of the Bill is to provide for those people caught in a bind with a one-off opportunity to come clean without fear of punitive measures or of being crippled by debt. The Bill would allow the Department to draw a line in the sand. It would involve a write-down for people of moneys that potentially could have been owed because you cannot measure it. The primary thing is it would create savings. We came up with a figure of 10,000 applicants and there has been some criticism of it in the debate. An amnesty would be followed if accepted with two months intensification of the Department's standard anti-fraud and control measures. While the amnesty would involve the Department forgoing payments, those would be significantly outweighed by the size of the control savings. The Department only ever recoups a tiny fraction of an overspend. Sometimes that is because a person is no longer in receipt of social welfare payments and is not pursued unless he or she goes back into the system and sometimes it is because to take anything greater than a negligible sum at the 15% rate would cause an entire family to become destitute. In the majority of cases it is simply difficult to establish when an overpayment commenced. Those are issues to consider.

It has been argued that a social welfare amnesty would reward benefit cheats. Similar to all amnesties, whether offered by the police or other authorities including the tax and knife amnesties, this is about drawing a line in the sand and improving matters into the future. Governments have offered many amnesties over the years and should consider this one. It is about exceptional cases and not something that can be replayed over and over again. Deputy Joe Costello's constituency is similar to mine and he will understand how often those in receipt of social welfare will fail because they lead such chaotic lives to inform the Department of Social Welfare or even their partners of changes in circumstances. I acknowledge that others chance their arm while others are caught in a moment and find themselves stuck in it and fearful. There are others who may have been involved in some defrauding of the State at an earlier point but who have now genuinely lost their jobs. While as a matter of technicality they owe the State the money, they have no capacity to pay it. To demand anything of them would cause chaos in their families and exacerbate things.

There were two previous social welfare amnesties, one in 1991 and one in 1993, both of which were unmitigated failures. At least one was proposed by a Fianna Fáil-Labour Party Government.

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