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

I do not dispute anything the Deputy has said. I am grateful to him for acknowledging the good service given by the Department. It is apt for me to state the Department of Employment Affairs and Social Protection makes 1.2 million payments every week and has a really good record, which is why it is so difficult to understand how this issue was as badly managed and communicated as it was.

One of the questions the Deputy asked me earlier was why there had been no communications prior to the change. I do not yet have an answer for him, other than to say it was supposed to be seamless and people were not supposed to see any change, except that the system would be more efficient. That was a mistake.

The other question the Deputy has asked me is what caused the issue to arise. There is not just one issue, there were a number of issues that conspired together to cause a problem to arise in one week that was solved the following week and which then gave rise to another issue. That tells me that we should have tested the system for far longer in the virtual world as opposed to going live in the real world and affecting customers as badly as we have.

The Deputy has said we failed people. I only accept failure when something is over and cannot be fixed. We have fixed it this week, but I acknowledge how badly we have let people down.

On direct communications with customers in the past couple of weeks, we wrote 55,000 letters, albeit they were late, but I hope that explains to our clients, customers and the people in receipt of illness benefit what happened. More importantly, lessons need to be learned. We have arranged for an independent review to be carried out of how the changes in illness benefit payments were planned, how they were implemented and, most importantly, how they were or not communicated to clients. The report is being conducted by an independent person outside the Department and I expect to have it by Christmas.

What is most important to me is that I can say everybody who is entitled to receive an illness benefit payment, outside of routine issues that can happen to anybody at any time and human errors, is receiving the payment to which he or she is entitled. Because of the lessons we have learned, we will go back to a payment in arrears system for all new payments from this week onwards.

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