Peadar Tóibín (Meath West, Aontú)
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109. To ask the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection the amount paid out in fraudulent pandemic unemployment payment payments since the start of the Covid pandemic. [7722/25]

Dara Calleary (Mayo, Fianna Fail)
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Overpayments of social welfare entitlements can occur where a person provides false or misleading information in their application or through error on the part of either the claimant or the Department. Persons who have been overpaid social welfare have a liability to refund the overpayment as they have been in receipt of a payment to which they were not entitled.

Cases involving fraudulent or suspected fraudulent activity arise where a deciding officer is satisfied that there is sufficient evidence that a person deliberately provided false or misleading information or wilfully concealed relevant information in relation to their entitlement. The Deputy will appreciate that there is a high evidential standard to be met in such cases.

It should be noted that some 880,000 people received at least one payment under the Pandemic Unemployment Payments (PUP) scheme. In total, some 30 million payments issued under the scheme, at an overall spend of €10bn.

The Department has a dedicated unit reviewing PUP claims where there are indications, for example through data matching with Revenue employment and earnings records, that a payment may have been made incorrectly. To date, just over 42,400 PUP overpayments have been assessed by my department to a value of €101.5m, with €27.5m recovered. Of these, about 1,400 PUP overpayments were considered to have arisen because of suspected fraud, and overpayments have been raised in these cases to a value of €6.4m with recoveries of €1.2m.

I trust that this clarifies the matter for the Deputy.