€115m owed in welfare over-payments

Public Accounts Committee: There is €115 million outstanding in over-payments which were made to social welfare recipients, the committee heard yesterday.

Secretary general of the Department of Social and Family Affairs John Hynes said some of this money went back a number of years. In theory all of it was recoverable. However getting it back in practice was another issue.

He said the department had found that payments to lone parents contributed to a lot of the over-payment figures.

Unemployment benefit paid to people who were working and pension payments also accounted for a significant element.

Mr Hynes said the Comptroller and Auditor General had recorded over-payments of €56.27 million in 2004 compared with €39.4 million in 2003.

He said these increases were due largely to the work of a special team which looked at over-payments mainly involving lone parents. This identified over-payments of €24 million.

"In 2004 some €11.5 million was recovered in cash, and some €8.3 million by deductions from arrears or ongoing payments.

"We are putting increased emphasis on pursuing debtors who are no longer in receipt of payments, and who may, for example, be in employment and therefore have greater financial resources from which to make payments."

He also said there were legitimate concerns about identity fraud and a need for robust controls to protect the integrity of personal public sector (PPS) numbers.

A department evaluation of a sample of 1,593 PPS numbers in 2000 found that 10 per cent had been fraudulently obtained. Such fraud could cost €25 million to €50 million annually.

Mr Hynes said steps had been taken to ensure that staff in 120 local offices were provided with training and back-up support and equipment to detect bogus identities where they were used as part of the registration process.

He said over 270,000 PPS numbers were issued last year.

He said there had been cases where non-EU nationals tried to say that they were EU nationals and produced forged documents to circumvent work-permit legislation.

He said that a PPS number did not prove that a person was genuinely who they said they were.

Comptroller John Purcell said while the department was not complacent about the PPS issue, it had to "up its game" all the time.

If there was to be movement towards a full "E-government" system then it was very important to have secure PPS numbers.

John McGuinness of Fianna Fáil said the issue of the security of PPS numbers was a serious one.

A report by the comptroller last year said the department's systems could not recognise foreign names.

The department's director of information systems Niall Barry told the committee its system was more effective in dealing with names from Ireland or England with which it had more experience.