Jim O'Keeffe (Cork South West, Fine Gael)
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Question 199: To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Enterprise, Trade and Employment the reason for the delay in payment of a redundancy refund of €44,041 to company (details supplied) in County Cork for which the claim was made on 24 June 2009; and if she will arrange for immediate payment. [34939/09]

Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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The Redundancy Payments Section of my Department received a number of statutory rebate applications from the company concerned on 26 June 2009.

However, the Redundancy Payments Section of my Department is in receipt of an unprecedented level of claims for redundancy payment that are giving rise to very significant delays in the processing of those payments for both companies and individuals. Currently, the average time it takes to process rebate applications from employers filed online is 7 months while claims submitted by post are taking 8 months. The Department is currently processing rebate claims submitted online from March '09 and claims filed manually from February '09.

To put it in perspective, at end September 2009, the number of Redundancy claims paid by my Department relating to applications received in 2009 and earlier years, amounted to 32,127. This equates to payments of around €206.5 million, both to employers and, in some cases, directly to employees. This means the Department is issuing an average of around €5.7 million per week in redundancy payments. The backlog of applications awaiting payment at end September '09 stands at 43,250. Of this total, an estimated 10,500 claims are the subject of requests for further information.

Naturally, the Tánaiste and I share concerns about current processing times which individuals and employers continue to experience and further initiatives, including that of additional resourcing measures, have been implemented in order to improve the turnaround in the processing of redundancy payments.