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

I thank the Deputies. I am not standing here in front of anybody trying to justify any of the actions that happened over recent months. I have said on a number of occasions that this is particularly difficult to accept because an exemplary level of service is offered by people in the Department 99.9% of the time. That is why this debacle is so difficult to try to explain. I assure Deputy O'Dea that I am not talking in the past tense. We have issued over 50,000 payments in recent days. We have issued 29,000 payments this week alone, and it is only Tuesday afternoon. On average, we would have 50,000 people on illness benefit in any given week. That has been the average weekly tranche this year, last year and the year before and it will be the expected number of weekly payments next year.

All arrears have been paid. There may be cases in which arrears are still due. We are using the business-as-usual manual processing for some of the old forms. Anyone who is awaiting arrears from an old payment form will receive those arrears this week. There has been a significant reduction in the number of calls being made to our helpline arising from the changes that have been made in recent weeks. That is how I know that the vast majority of changes have been successful. The number of calls has returned to normal levels. I reiterate that there will always be cases in which people are refused illness payments because they are not entitled to such payments, because the medical certificate was not filled out correctly - the incorrect date may have been used, for example - or because a payment was missed. There will always be a small number of issues with some of the 50,000 payments that are made each week. That was true of the old system and it is true of the new system.

The first change that we made was made in August. It had to be made because just 50% of doctors were using the new form. I acknowledge and accept that this was our fault. There was a lack of communication with doctors. We have learned so much. It is probably the case that we have yet to identify things that we need to learn. I hope that will happen on foot of Revenue's independent audit. The only thing I can genuinely do is apologise sincerely to the people we have distressed over the last couple of months. It was never our intention to distress them. While we were trying to improve the system, we genuinely upset people. This was not our intention. We are going to make sure it does not happen again.

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