Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

I do not have the figures immediately to hand but the Senator may be aware that it has been a departmental policy for the past number of years that where the level of the abuse or fraud is material, that is above a figure of, say, ¤20,000 or so, prosecutions will be made and prosecutions are taking place. The media in general report on such cases. Once a decision is made to proceed with the potential of a prosecution being made, the matter passes out of the hands of the Department and is administered by the State's prosecution service. In recent years the Judiciary has taken a very serious view of any fraud or abuse of the social welfare system. Such cases are reported regularly and extensively in the media. There has been a significant increase in cases and in some of them, particularly those that involve fake multiple identities, which unfortunately has become an issue of abuse in the social welfare system, penalties have been imposed, including jail time. The courts have taken a very serious view of such abuse but the detailed prosecution of the individual is a matter ultimately for the prosecution service.

The special investigations unit of the Department of Social Protection has set up a series of special programmes, the detail of which I will not go into now, to target serious areas of fraud, including people who steal and adopt identities and use them to abuse or defraud the social welfare system. That is not a matter for today in the context of this Bill. If the Senator wishes, at a future stage in the Seanad we can go into the details of the anti-fraud special investigations unit of the Department, which works with other agencies such as the Revenue Commissioners, the Garda and customs to ensure that persons suspected of social welfare fraud are pursued and that the fraud is stopped. If the amounts of money involved are of a serious nature, those matters are taken to the prosecution authorities and they make a decision whether to go ahead and prosecute. The Senator will be aware that some very severe sentences have been handed down to people who adopted multiple identity frauds resulting in very significant losses to the Department. This would be a person who has collected benefits in the name of a person who is dead or who has stolen other people's identities and built up an amount collected from the benefits over a number of years. As the Senator can imagine, that would result in a very significant loss of money to the Department.

Our proposal is that in such a case recovering those moneys at ¤2 a week does not send out a serious message. The provisions with which we will deal in section 13 provide for the moneys to be recovered at a moderate amount of up to 15% of the principal payment. It does not affect the person's children or other dependants. This would result in significant recovery of moneys for the Department over a period a time. When overpayments come to light in the future, we will be in a position to initiate recovery of more serious sums from the time the overpayment was discovered, bearing in mind that the social welfare officials will have due regard to the position of the individual and the circumstances which gave rise to the overpayment.