John McGuinness (Carlow-Kilkenny, Fianna Fail) | Oireachtas source

I welcome the various initiatives and payment increases contained in the Social Welfare Bill but I want to focus on the amount of money that is lost through fraud and error within the Department. I ask the Minister to outline exactly what he is doing to ensure that the current levels of error and fraud do not continue. It appears, from the various cases I have studied, that people who are marginalised and in receipt of benefit of some kind are allowed to draw payments in error for a considerable length of time before the error is acknowledged. While current legislation provides that a certain percentage of overpayments can be drawn back from the individuals concerned, the fact of the matter is that they do not have the money to pay the Department back. An individual on a social welfare payment could be faced with the prospect of having to pay back €20,000, €30,000 or €40,000, such is the level of error that can occur. It is not right that any individual could have been overpaid for that amount of time without someone realising that something was wrong. This is either a system failure or a staff failure and the Minister should look at it closely.

On the issue of fraud, how much of the €1 billion lost through fraud and error is lost through fraud alone? The Minister must quantify that and determine how best to deal with it. The sums of money that are lost through fraud and error are vast. If one thinks of how that money could be applied to the various headings within the social welfare provisions, one realises that people would benefit by far more than the €5 per week increase that they received in the budget. The Minister could have considerably more resources at his disposal to give to social welfare recipients if resources were put in place to assist departmental staff to improve the systems and to ensure that erroneous or fraudulent payments are discovered early and stopped.

In his response to this debate, I ask the Minister to provide details on the amount of money outstanding to the Department due to fraud or error. I also ask him to confirm the total amount of error related overpayments that people are currently attempting to pay back.

Could he define what has been accumulated over the years, how it is being paid back and what the success rate is? I would suggest to the Minister that the success rate in terms of repayment is not great but that the Government does need to focus support staff and the systems to ensure it does not continue to occur year in, year out. This has been reported on by the Comptroller and Auditor General, it is not just something I have picked out of the sky. It is an issue. We should always look at the other side of the balance sheet when we are dealing with expenditure. It is not just how you spend the money and the benefits you pay out. It is about how we can ensure we do not have the type of losses we have seen over the years, so perhaps we would have more to pay out than what we have.

I take issue with the Department in respect of the self employed. The self employed take the risk and create the employment and, hopefully, the profits on which they pay taxes, which come into the State and are thereafter shared out to the less well off and those who need that State support. However, those very people - either individuals or families - are not themselves supported. The Minister is taking an initiative in this budget but far more needs to be done to ensure that businesspeople who take the risk but who fall foul of their project or who just cannot continue for one reason or another are given the appropriate supports that are necessary. If we can learn anything from the US presidential election or indeed from Brexit, it is that there is a feeling widespread in Ireland, the US, the UK and throughout Europe that, to take a phrase from the US presidential election, there are people who have been forgotten. The pledge from President-elect Trump was that those who have been forgotten will not continue to be forgotten. We seem to have a number of people who have been left behind by the State and who have been forgotten.

A lot of those people are within the social welfare system. I would question whether some of the new initiatives that are taken in the Department to take people from social welfare and put them into training and whatever else might be made available to them are valuable or successful. I have seen cases where the Department is suggesting that a client goes on a community employment scheme and the other agency of the State is suggesting something entirely different. The Department is the one I would be led by but apparently when the person goes into that agency, they are then outside the social protection network. This needs to be looked at because I have come across a number of clients who are treated badly by that agency. The one thing I have noticed in this House since I was first elected is that the Department and its officials are very prompt and very good at what they do. They do need support, as I suggested earlier. This new agency does not have the flexibility that is required to deal with some of the issues that arise in individual cases. When I as a public representative have to intervene for those people, the chances of getting a phone call back from that agency are nil. The chance of getting to grips with and informing it of the anomalies in its system is nil. On the other hand, the Department has been excellent in terms of the learning process about their clients and the issues we raise as public representatives in the context of a better service for them.

Turning to the issue of social welfare benefits and local authority rents, where a benefit is given to a recipient who is marginalised and in need of support from social welfare, another arm of the State should not take back some of that money. If, say, a fiver is given, some other part of the State will take €1, €2 or €3 and the fiver becomes nothing. While the Minister for Finance may say there are no new taxes, there are many new taxes and many impositions on elderly people in particular in terms of prescription charges, their health care and so on. They are battling with the State day in, day out and they have a sense that the State is actually beating them up. It is not being responsive to them, is not giving them the care they need and is not ensuring that they are offered the protection of the Government for which they, or indeed all of us in this House, voted.

This is what alienates a lot of people from politics. They look upon us here as an elite that does not understand their problems when in fact, it is bureaucracy that cannot be gotten past to influence them, not to do something wrong but to do something right at a basic level, which is understanding the customers they have and dealing with them promptly and efficiently. If that was to happen, we would not have as many people at our clinics because the State would actually be working. I am suggesting to the Minister that there are reforms that are necessary within the Department that will benefit the spending of that money but there is also a need for humanity and compassion in every Department. Otherwise, we lose the support and understanding of the people because they see themselves as being the forgotten people.

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