Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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354. To ask the Minister for Social Protection further to Parliamentary Question No. 140 of 11 May 2017, the number of persons who owe his Department less than €1,000, between €1,000 and €2,000, between €2,000 and €5,000, between €5,000 and €10,000, between €10,000 and €15,000, between €15,000 and €20,000, and in excess of €20,000 respectively, in tabular form; the total value of debt in each of the categories; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [24590/17]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Overpayments of benefit or assistance arise where a person is paid in excess of their entitlement or paid where no entitlement exists. At the end of 2016, the outstanding value of these overpayments was €482.4m in respect of 174,440 persons involving 191,600 individual overpayments. The breakdown sought by the Deputy is provided in the following table.

TABLE: Overpayment outstanding at end 2016 broken down by value and number of persons

I hope this clarifies the matter for the Deputy.

Seán Fleming (Laois, Fianna Fail)
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355. To ask the Minister for Social Protection further to Parliamentary Question No. 140 of 11 May 2017, further to the €41 million stated to be owed as a result of customer fraud, the number of persons that owe the Department less than €1,000, between €1,000 and €2,000, between €2,000 and €5,000, between €5,000 and €10,000, between €10,000 and €15,000, between €15,000 and €20,000, and in excess of €20,000 respectively in tabular form; the total value of debt in each of the categories; and if he will make a statement on the matter. [24591/17]

Leo Varadkar (Dublin West, Fine Gael)
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Overpayments of benefit or assistance arise where a person is paid in excess of their entitlement or paid where no entitlement exists. In 2016, the Department overpaid customers by €110 million. Of this, customer fraud accounted for €41 million and relates to cases where customers were deemed to have intentionally provided incomplete or inaccurate information in order to receive benefits or deliberately failed to inform the Department of relevant changes in circumstances.

The number and value of the cases of customer fraud in 2016 is broken down in the following table.

TABLE

Of these cases, a total of 5,984 cases had fully repaid their debt by the end of 2016 to the value of €6.0 million. A further 3,665 cases had repaid €3.0 million in respect of overpayments of €13.6 million by the end of 2016.

A total of 6,576 overpayments valued at €21.4 million were not being repaid at the end of 2016. Of these, some €5.3 million worth of overpayments are in respect of 329 cases where recovery action was suspended due ongoing processes or pending appeal outcomes from the Social Welfare Appeals Office. The remaining 6,247 cases involving €16.1 million in overpayments are categorised as follows:

- 1,821 cases valued at €4 million were overpayments were assessed in Q4 of 2016 and had not yet commenced making payments to the Department by year end;

- 1,231 cases valued at €5.6 million involved customers who had a previous overpayment which they are required to repay in full before commencing repayment of any subsequent overpayment; and

- 3,195 cases valued at €6.5 million were not repaying at year end and were subject to further recovery action by the Department.

The outstanding balance of the fraud overpayments raised in 2016 at the end of April 2017 was €29.1 million.

I trust this clarifies the matter for the Deputy.