Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source

I particularly thank the Deputy not just for raising this matter but also for his patience and waiting for me to be available to reply to this debate. I know he raised the matter before the Halloween break but I was not available on the day so I am grateful that he is allowing me to put the following on the record of the House and respond to his queries. The matter has affected not just people in Donegal but people nationally so my response applies to all of them.

My Department implemented a new information technology, IT, system on 4 August 2018 as part of a programme of modernising its approach to managing illness payment claims and this was a first step in a programme which planned amongst other things to provide quicker access to payments for customers, move from a paper system for medical certs, greatly reduce the manual processing work involved in administering claims and move illness benefit payments off a legacy payments IT platform that is approaching end of life to a new system that is already managing many of the Department's other payments.

Unfortunately, although the majority of customers continued to receive payments, following implementation a number of difficulties arose. These included some customers missing or not receiving payments or receiving split payments for a week rather than a single weekly payment. In particular, by moving from a week in arrears system to a real-time payment system, difficulties arose with some people receiving split or in many cases lower payments. Additionally, the change from a payment in arrears approach to a current week payment approach coupled with the new system, which has very tightly defined rules and is a very unforgiving system, led to payments being blocked altogether for reasons that might not have been applied under the old human-led manual system. These issues caused difficulties for many customers, leading to a large volume of calls to the Department's helpline and long delays in responding to calls. As the Deputy noted, in some cases the calls were not responded to at all. In order to address this, the Department deployed additional staff to manage customer calls but, regrettably, there were still delays for many customers.

My Department has been working hard over the past few weeks to resolve the many issues that arose, including allocating additional staff to illness benefit claim work and developing a number of IT modifications to identify and rectify payment issues. I am pleased to note that payment levels of illness benefit are now at their normal level.

For information, in any one week we pay approximately 50,000 customers who are entitled to an illness benefit payment. Last week approximately 54,000 payments were made, while approximately 4,000 payments in excess of the normal weekly payments were made to customers who were due arrears. The Department would like to assure people that they will receive their back payments that continue to be outstanding as soon as possible, which will be this week and in the coming weeks.

The Department confirms that a normal level of payments will issue to illness benefit customers this week and every week from there on. It is important to note that there will always be some people who will not be paid in a given week for a variety of reasons, due to issues such as delays in receipt of claims and/or certificates, incorrectly completed certificates, human error, inconsistencies between the information submitted and the information already on file or the existence of another welfare payment for the main claimant or his or her dependants on the claim, all of which can lead to payments being suspended or delayed. This is not new and would have occurred under the old system. Therefore, these are routine issues over and above the non-routine issues that have happened in recent weeks.

I acknowledge that the majority of the delays in the past few weeks were due to system and processing issues rather than the normal levels of exceptions. I genuinely and sincerely apologise, not only to the Deputies who have been representing their constituents but to all persons who were not in receipt of proper payments of illness benefit in recent weeks.

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