Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent)
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I thank the Minister for taking this issue. I know she has spoken on the matter a number of times already but this Topical Issue was deferred from a number of weeks ago before the Houses went into recess. I appreciate the opportunity to speak to the Minister and I hope some clarification can be offered to those affected by the delays in processing the payment of illness benefit. For over two months now there have been major delays in the processing and payment of illness benefit to people across the country. I have been contacted every day by constituents in Donegal genuinely upset by the disruption to their payment. One can imagine what they were thinking when suddenly no money was coming to their account.

This payment is granted to people unable to work and it is a very important income source for many affected by disabilities of varying degrees. As an income source the money is used to pay typical bills, including rent, mortgages and utilities. One can imagine the chaos that ensued when somebody's main income source suddenly dried up and the person was left to find alternative income. That is exactly what happened. Most people were getting staggered payments of a little here and there but some were not getting any payments whatever with no clarification or warning from the Department. Some constituents who contacted me only found out about this when direct debits and standing orders were not successful and overdraft fees were charged. As a result, people have been forced to take out unnecessary loans or have had their credit rating compromised.

Attempts by people to contact the Department were in vain and many gave up trying, as they preferred to contact my office instead as they panicked about getting their payments restored. Staff in my office were unable to contact the Department and phone calls were continuously left unanswered. For that reason, I asked parliamentary questions of the Minister to see why our calls were not being answered. This is when we discovered the Department was switching to a new system. I have contacted the Department since and the Minister's office has been particularly helpful, allowing us to bypass the lengthy parliamentary questions process for the time being. I thank the Minister and her staff for that. I commend the staff on the support they have offered but we really should not have been in this position to begin with.

I understand the Minister made a commitment that last week would see the end to delays and the resolution of payment issues. However, we are still getting calls from people to say they are still only receiving partial payments. People whose payments were corrected recently have even been delayed again. How can that be possible? The most worrying aspect of this is that the recipients about which we contacted the Department were told they had already been paid when that was not the case. The Department has requested these individuals to provide a copy of their bank statement to prove they have not been paid, which is a completely unfair and unwarranted request. The Department should have to prove it paid the money rather than the other way around, as this is the fault of the Department rather than the recipient.

This matter has not yet been fully resolved and as a result of delays, people are in a compromised financial position. In effect, they are being penalised for something over which they had no control. No initial communication or warning was given to recipients that changes were being made to the system and we still do not understand how it caused such confusion and delays to payments. It is my duty to bring this matter to the Dáil as every week I still get people coming to my constituency offices in Donegal because they are not receiving their entitlement.

I take the opportunity to ask the following crucial questions, which I know are on everybody's minds. What caused this delay? Why was no communication made to recipients prior to changes being made and why was the response to the problems so slow? Why were Department staff not available and phone calls unanswered in the meantime? Most important, will the Department provide a stand-alone compensatory payment to all those affected who have been financially compromised as a direct result of the Department's mistakes?

Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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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.

Pat Gallagher (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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I call Deputy Pringle.

Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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I would like to finish by saying-----

Pat Gallagher (Donegal, Fianna Fail)
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The Minister will have a further two minutes.

Thomas Pringle (Donegal, Independent)
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I thank the Minister for her response so far. It is true that this is exceptional and not the norm, as the Minister acknowledged in what she said. That is vitally important because it would not be a Topical Issue if it was normal. What really sticks with people is the fact that it happened out of the blue and the first they knew about it was when the money did not appear in their accounts. They had received no correspondence from the Department about what was happening or indicating that there was a change taking place. Something could have been communicated to them to tell them to expect delays because of the change. These are the customers of the Department if we look at it in an economic sense and it has let them down badly. If it was Dunnes Stores or Bank of Ireland, we would be jumping up and down and saying it is not acceptable that they should treat people like this. I get on very well with officials in the Department which is generally very good in dealing with clients and customers and gives them a good response, but in this instance it has failed. That has to be acknowledged and recognised by it. People are suffering as a result and that also has to be recognised by the Department. That is why I have asked the Minister if she will apply the stand-alone compensatory payment for people who have incurred genuine extra costs through no fault of their own. They depend on this system which has failed them and let them down. The Minister should issue an exceptional needs payment to them.

Regina Doherty (Meath East, Fine Gael)
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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.