Written answers

Tuesday, 30 June 2009

Department of Agriculture and Food

Grant Payments

11:00 pm

Photo of Kathleen LynchKathleen Lynch (Cork North Central, Labour)
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Question 103: To ask the Minister for Agriculture, Fisheries and Food the reason there have been delays in REPS 4 payments; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [26059/09]

Photo of Brendan SmithBrendan Smith (Cavan-Monaghan, Fianna Fail)
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The delays in processing REPS 4 applications occurred mainly as a result of the urgent need to devise a comprehensive system of eligibility checks following EU audits in late 2007 and early 2008 as a result of which the European Commission indicated that the previous system of checking did not meet the requirements of the new EU Regulations now in force. To reduce the risk of a "financial correction" (recoupment by the EU of a significant amount of EU funding for REPS in 2007 and 2008), it was necessary to develop and introduce a new system of checks that would be acceptable to the European Commission. This work took much of 2008 to complete and it was only at the end of January 2009 that the first phase of checking could be carried out. This was a computerised screening of plans prepared on the eREPS system. This screening raised queries about a large majority of plans. Most of these were resolved in a subsequent manual examination of all plans which inevitably took some months. My Department also contacted a large number of applicants to enable them to correct minor deficiencies in their plans. Payments have been released as applications were cleared or corrected.

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