Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour) | Oireachtas source

Last year, the Seanad and the Dáil passed into law legislation applying to people in receipt of social welfare payments of any kind with an overpayment to allow for the recovery of up to 15% from the principal payment. I stress that this may apply to up to €28 per week from somebody in receipt of a personal payment of €188 per week. That is to allow for recovery, as opposed to previous arrangements, which allowed a maximum of €2 per week. That is unless, as occurs with many people, a voluntary arrangement is made. If the voluntary arrangement is reasonable and acceptable to both sides, I advise people to take it up.

The legislation we are examining today relates to people who are not receiving a social welfare income but who are in work or who have other assets, means or a business. It is to recover money from them in the same way that money is recovered from people on social welfare. The legislation we are now considering does not apply to people on social welfare but rather people who may have extensive savings, as happens in a number of cases and particularly if there is a case of fraud involved. If, for example, somebody was taking three social welfare payments by collecting money in two or three social welfare offices - this would probably be identity fraud - it would be a serious problem. One could imagine the results if these people could get €10,000 or €12,000 per year undetected for three or five years, and the amounts would build up. Recently we have detected people who have done this over a much longer period.

When we were discussing photos, I mentioned information technology with the new photo personal service cards.

If somebody is collecting a social welfare payment in the Killarney office, IT will then ask whether this could be the same person who is collecting money from Ballinasloe and the office in Tallaght. IT will have discovered that it is the same individual. In that case, an investigating officer will examine the case, which may be prosecuted. It is really important that we build up a system where we recover the overpayments quite quickly. This section applies to people who are no longer being paid social welfare and are at work or have means through some other mechanism and arranges recovery from those means. We can send the Senator a copy. Once the legislation is passed, officials will be working on the regulations so we should have them available by the end of the summer and will be putting a copy in the library of the Houses.