Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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547. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection the number of data breaches suffered by her Department in each of the past five years and to date in 2021. [26106/21]

Heather Humphreys (Cavan-Monaghan, Fine Gael)
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My Department identified the following number of data breaches in each of the past five years and to date in 2021.

My Department takes data protection obligations very seriously. In order to protect the personal data of its customers, the Department has a set of data protection policies, procedures and guidelines in place.

While every data breach is a matter of great concern to my Department, the number of confirmed breaches should be viewed in the context of the scale of the Department’s business, administering over 70 separate schemes and services, accounting for approximately €30bn per annum and processing almost 2m applications every year.

In particular, in 2020, the Department has provided services to an extraordinarily high volume of customers. At one point, the Department was processing over 50,000 claims per day. At its peak, in early May 2020, 602,000 were in receipt of PUP. Just under 20 million PUP payments have been made to nearly 900,000 people providing income support of some €7.5 billion to date.

The vast majority of the confirmed data breaches relate to incidents where customer information was accidentally and inadvertently disclosed to third parties, e.g. letters incorrectly addressed. In each of these incidents, the Department followed procedures in accordance with data protection legislation. Every effort was made to secure data as quickly and efficiently as possible.