Pearse Doherty (Donegal South West, Sinn Fein)
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41. To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Foreign Affairs and Trade the reason a person (details supplied) in County Donegal has not received a refund of the payment made in relation to an application for a passport which was denied; the reason for the delay; when the refund will be paid to them; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [12719/14]

Eamon Gilmore (Dún Laoghaire, Labour)
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It is the policy of the Passport Service to refund fees that exceed the statutory amount or in situations where either the applicant has cancelled their application or does not qualify for a passport under the Passports Act, 2008. In this particular case, the applicant does not qualify for a passport on the grounds that he is not an Irish citizen. Accordingly, he is entitled to a refund of the paid passport fee of €80. However, as part of a wider civil service reform programme, the Office of the Paymaster General advised Government Departments to move from an existing manual payments system, involving the use of payable orders/cheques, to an electronic and direct means of transferring of funds to an applicant’s bank account.

The Department has therefore been working on developing a new system to issue refunds by electronic funds transfer (EFT) as opposed to the previous method of issuing by payable order. System changes needed to link the EFT requirements between the Automated Passport System, which generates the refunds and the Department’s Financial Management System, which issues the payments, are currently being tested. The new system will be in place in the coming weeks. In the meantime, the Passport Service is operating an interim manual cheque payment for certain urgent refunds. A cheque in respect of the refund of passport fees for the person in question has been issued.