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

The Department transferred administration of the illness benefit scheme to our new core business objects IT platform in August 2018. Although the system worked effectively for over 80% of illness benefit customers, significant difficulties arose following implementation for a large number of recipients. My Department took three main steps to resolve the issues impacting on payments. It deployed additional resources to process work and respond to inquiries. It developed some new system processes that addressed the payment gap issues and to ensure a faster flow-through of payments. It continued to review the design rules in the system to afford greater flexibility in processing of claims and certificates. As a consequence of the steps just described, people who are due a payment and whose certificates and claims are in order are thankfully receiving their full payment entitlements. In excess of 50,000 payments are made every week, which is the same number that we would have had before we made the changes on 6 August.

Telephone helpline and call handling performance has also been addressed and is now back to normal levels. The staff in the illness benefit section are particularly pleased about that. People who are due a payment and whose certificates and claims are in order now receive their payment entitlement promptly. In stating this, it is important, since I am sure Deputies will know of various instances where people are still not receiving payment, to say that there are always cases where people do not receive what they might expect to get in a specific week. That is true today for a variety of reasons but it also existed prior to 6 August when we moved to the new system. We will endeavour to keep those to a minimum but it is inevitable that some errors will be made in illness benefits, given that we have over 9,000 transactions per day. Human beings receive those transactions and work on them every day.

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