Seán Sherlock (Cork East, Labour)
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Question 293: To ask the Minister for Social Protection the way in which he plans to allow persons who receive jobseeker's allowance and jobseeker's benefit to complete the certification process by mobile phone. [30685/10]

Éamon Ó Cuív (Galway West, Fianna Fail)
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To qualify for jobseeker's benefit or jobseeker's allowance, a jobseeker must fulfil a number of conditions, including being available for and genuinely seeking work. To fulfil these conditions, jobseekers must at regular intervals make a declaration that they are still unemployed, available for and actively seeking work. This is known as the certification process and is currently carried out by attending at the Social Welfare Local Office.

The mobile phone certification project will examine the potential to develop an additional channel for jobseeker's certification via the mobile phone.

Certification is carried out at regular intervals, usually monthly. The currently envisaged process is that selected jobseeker's claimants will register to use the service and, as part of the registration, the Department will record and store their voiceprint. At certification time, the Department will contact the customer on their mobile phone, verify the location of the phone and then verify the customer's identity by comparing the voiceprint from the telephone conversation with the stored voiceprint. If these verifications are successful, certification will then be completed.

This service will potentially allow people who receive jobseeker's allowance and jobseeker's benefit to complete the certification process by mobile phone. This would provide an alternative to the requirement for jobseeker's allowance and jobseeker's benefit claimants to attend their Social Welfare Local Office to certify. The initiative would provide improved customer service and also reduce the Departmental resources required to administer certification.

The proposed mobile phone certification solution has a number of innovative features, from both a business process and technical perspective. The Department has to evaluate how these might work in practice before committing to full-scale deployment. In particular, deployment will not proceed unless it offers at least the same level of control as existing processes