Jim O'Callaghan (Dublin Bay South, Fianna Fail)
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509. To ask the Tánaiste and Minister for Justice and Equality about his plans to create a national fraud database, and if he will make a statement on the matter. [35748/17]

Charles Flanagan (Laois, Fine Gael)
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The Deputy will recall that the Department of Finance undertook a review into the cost of motor insurance in the latter half of 2016. The ensuing report published by the Department of Finance in January 2017, ‘Report on the Cost of Motor Insurance’, included a recommendation (Recommendation No. 25) to establish a fully functioning integrated fraud database for the insurance industry to detect patterns of fraud. The Department of Justice and Equality was charged with implementing this recommendation and set up a working group to progress this recommendation.

The recommendation proposes that the recommended database will reduce levels of insurance fraud by providing access to details of incident data which can be used to detect patterns of potentially fraudulent behaviour. Specifically, the working group was convened to determine the parameters of the database to be established and consider the policy and legislative issues as well as funding, access and content.

The working group is made up of representatives from the Crime, Civil Law and Criminal Law Divisions of my Department, An Garda Síochána’s Garda National Economic Crime Bureau (GNECB), Insurance Ireland and the Motor Insurance Bureau of Ireland (MIBI). Terms of Reference were agreed by the working group, which has met on 7 occasions to date.

The group has engaged in discussions with the Office of the Attorney General, the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner and the respective UK bodies dealing with insurance fraud (i.e. Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department (IFED) and the Insurance Fraud Bureau (IFB)) as part of its work and these interactions have fed into a working group report, which outlines the working group's consultations, analysis and recommendations. The working group intends to submit this report to the Office of the Attorney General and the Office of the Data Protection Commissioner for their views, following which the report will be submitted to the Cost of Insurance Working Group, which is chaired by my colleague, the Minister of State, Michael D'Arcy, T.D.

If it is determined, following this initial scoping exercise, that an insurance fraud database (including the possibility of expanding the existing industry database) is a viable option, then a further exercise will be carried out to put the necessary legislative and other measures in place to facilitate it.