£214m saved by anti-fraud measures, says Ahern

Stringent new measures to root out welfare fraud and abuse saved the Exchequer £214 million last year, according to the annual report of the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs.

Achieved through computer cross-matching of welfare applications and a more aggressive approach to debt recovery, the savings were made on more than 450,000 claims.

Half the savings were made on unemployment claims, while pensions claims accounted for £53 million and illness claims for £36 million. Inspections of employer records identified arrears of PAYE/PRSI amounting to an additional £10.4 million.

The amount of fraud detected was up by almost a half last year over the previous year, with 269 cases passed to the Chief State Solicitor's Office for prosecution. A total of 199 people were convicted with a variety of (unspecified) penalties imposed. The corresponding figure for 1999 was 131 convicted.

The Department's social welfare budget was £5.4 billion last year. "Because of the drop in the number of people claiming social welfare, we have been able to increase spending significantly on old age and retirement pensions and child support," the Minister for Social, Community and Family Affairs, Mr Dermot Ahern, explained.

In 1997, £1 in every £4 allocated to social welfare went on employment and unemployment supports. Today that has dropped to £1 in £7. "Whereas in 1997 we spent most of that money on paying people to do nothing, today over 30 per cent of employment and unemployment spending goes to help people back to work and back to education," Mr Ahern said.

Over the same period, the proportion of the working population dependent on social welfare has fallen from one in four to fewer than one in five.

The report shows the Department is narrowly failing to meet many of the targets it has set for dealing with applications from customers. For example, it dealt with 47 per cent of claims for contributory old-age pensions within five weeks, when the target was 55 per cent. Only 26 per cent of applications for a carer's allowance had been dealt with in eight weeks, compared to the target of 80 per cent.