Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

The Senator's amendment referred to committees of the Dáil. Every year the Comptroller and Auditor General publishes the amounts of money outstanding to the Department of Social Protection and the Revenue Commissioners which he, along with the Committee of Public Accounts, would like to see recovered. This is a perfectly understandable part of public administrative policy.

Ó Murchú, Labhrás.

The arrears in regard to social welfare are just under ¤350 million. About 60% of people who are in arrears are also in receipt of a social welfare payment. The issue is covered in detail in section 13. If somebody owes the Department ¤1,500, which is the average sum that is owed in quite a number of significant cases, it does not take much to do the maths to calculate how long it will take to recover ¤1,500 at ¤2 a week. All we propose is that Department should be in a position to make those recoveries in a more timely fashion. It is a cause of some scandal if people who have got away with money owed to the Department, some of it through fraud and abuse, repay it at ¤2 a week over a long number of years. The repayment is simply to provide for the recovery of those amounts. What could be achieved with the recovery of ¤350 million, or even half of ¤350 million, over a period of three or five years? It would provide my Department with additional resources of somewhere between ¤20 million and ¤35 million to ¤40 million a year, which could be allocated to important areas such as paying pensioners. I do not understand what problem is with this proposal. As I said in my Second Stage speech, the proposal relates to an individual's personal individual payment; it does not affect the person's spouse, children or other dependants or any payments they or anybody else in the House may have. I made that very clear yesterday.

On the question of whether the staff in the Department of Social Protection take into the account the circumstances of the individual and the circumstances of the over-payment, I gave that undertaking in my speech yesterday. On the question of whether we should recover the overpayments, we should absolutely, because they will provide much needed resources, which all the Members of the House would be concerned to ensure would be devoted to social protection and to people who are entitled to social protection payments. That is what the proposal is about. The requirement in this respect and a discussion on it takes place annually at the Committee of Public Accounts and it appears annually in the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. However, should the social protection committee wish to discuss it, I am sure that if a member of the Senator's party is on that committee, he or she could raise the matter with the chairperson and it would be a matter for the committee and the chairperson to decide if they wish to discuss it further.