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

That is no problem. I was not sure. I thank the Deputy for clarifying that. We have not unrolled it. We continue to roll out the PSC through the standard authentication framework environment, SAFE, registration process. Although we have major efficiencies in the Department, we also have reduced payment leakage. The total costs for the project since its inception in mid-November 2019 are estimated at €69.4 million. From the first day we started to the end of November 2019, the estimated costs amount to €69.64 million. This includes a figure of €37 million for our staffing costs. However, it is important to say that none of the staff are new. A large proportion of the staff and the costs would have been incurred even if we did not introduce the SAFE 2 PSC process. This is because we had always sought to authenticate the identity of people who were claiming our services and finances thereafter. Previously, we had the social services card and that would have been administered by those staff. Before that, we had pensions books and free travel passes and a variety of different forms of authentication that would have been manned and womanned, as it were, by those staff members. The SAFE process formalised this approach, established a consistent approach across all of our offices and introduced a higher and more secure standard of identity using the token of the PSC which incorporated a photograph of the person.

If an allowance is made, as it properly should be, for the counterfactual or already existing costs, then the actual additional costs of the SAFE PSC process over the past nine years are approximately €39 million. Of the €69 million in new costs, for want of a better term, existing costs were €39 million. Set against these costs, the Department has realised savings to date related to administrative efficiencies and fraud detection that is conservatively estimated at €20 million.

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