Denis Naughten (Roscommon-South Leitrim, Independent)
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46. To ask the Minister for Social Protection her plans to address the persistent control savings associated with child benefit; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [43136/13]

Joan Burton (Dublin West, Labour)
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Child Benefit is a payment to parents for the support of their children. It is paid to approximately 606,000 families in respect of some 1.15 million children with an estimated expenditure of approximately €1.9 billion. I am very conscious of requirement to safeguard the Child Benefit budget and, in this regard, my Department has taken a proactive approach to ensuring that it is only paid to eligible families. The policy of issuing continuing eligibility certificates to parents commenced in 2008 and the control policy for the Scheme was reviewed in 2010 to ensure that controls on fraud and abuse of the scheme continue to be effective and relevant. As a result of this review, enhanced and updated control measures have been devised. Control savings are an estimate of the value of the various control activities across the schemes in payment. They refer to future expenditure that would have been incurred but for this control work. Without this control work, the social welfare expenditure would over time increase by this amount. Control savings are used as a performance indicator for year-on-year activities. They do not include any cases of departmental or clerical error or any cases where the customer voluntarily told the Department of changes to their means or circumstances, which resulted in a change to their rate of payment.

The total savings from Child Benefit control activity was €48.5 million in 2008, €89 million in 2009, €106 million in 2010, €85 million in 2011 and €83 million in 2012. The level of savings achieved is due to the effectiveness of the control programme in recent years.