Mattie McGrath (Tipperary, Independent)
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475. To ask the Minister for Social Protection the amount his Department has recovered, due to the implementation of Social Protection fraud prevention measures, in the past three years; if it is possible to receive a breakdown of same, in tabular form across the spectrum of Social Protection payment types, and by county; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [13159/16]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The Department’s Compliance and Anti-Fraud Strategy 2014-2018 provides for a range of measures to ensure that social welfare fraud and abuse is minimised and that control activity is appropriately focused. The 2015 Progress Report on the implementation of the Strategy was published at the end of April. The emphasis continues to be on preventing fraud and error from entering the system, improving detections and minimising error.

In recent years, a number of legislative provisions have been introduced to strengthen the Department’s capacity to recover debt. A new debt management system was also introduced at the end of 2014. The Department's policy is to pursue prosecutions in cases of fraud, where appropriate. Fraud prevention, detection and control systems are subject to continuing development to take account of new areas of fraud and technological advances.

The overall provisional level of overpayments recorded in 2015 amounted to €115.4m in respect of 81,600 individual overpayments. Overpayments attributable to fraud came to approx. €48.9m in respect of 21,407 individual cases.

Table 1 sets out the summary of overpayments and those resulting from suspected fraud for the years 2013-2015.

TABLE 1 – Recorded overpayments and those resulting from suspected fraud

The detailed information sought by the Deputy for recoveries of suspected fraud overpayments is only available for 2015 onwards (arising from the introduction of the new debt management system in late 2014) when an amount of approx. €26.7m was recovered.

Table 2 below gives a breakdown by scheme type of this figure and Table 3 breaks down the figure by county in which the customer is currently resident.

TABLE 2 – Recovery of suspected fraud overpayments by scheme type - 2015

Table 3 - Recovery of suspected fraud overpayments by county - 2015