Clare Daly (Dublin Fingal, Independent)
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601. To ask the Minister for Social Protection his views on the way in which the ERIN recording system calculates data and its potential to record individual claims numerous times thereby misrepresenting the figures; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [20473/17]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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The ERIN system in the Department is an integrated file tracking system that is used by staff in offices to pinpoint the location of a paper based case file at any given time, i.e. throughout its life cycle from creation to finalisation.

The system records and monitors the progress of the case file as it is assigned for action across the office network and to individual investigators.

When a case is assigned to an individual investigator, the officer assigns the case file to themselves on the ERIN system upon receipt of the paper file. When they have completed all necessary tasks associated with the case the officer closes their assignment and enters the onward destination in the Department where the case is being forwarded to for the next action. The paper file used would be transferred to the relevant office in parallel and the process repeated.

Given the use of the ERIN system for file tracking, the records included on it are reflective of the transactions that occur in the Department on the file journey that is required to process a case or claim.

The ERIN system is being phased out of operational use in the Department over the course of 2017 as use of paper based files is being discontinued.