A "basic income guarantee" would eliminate social welfare fraud as well as getting rid of poverty traps, according to Father Sean Healy, co-director of the justice office of the Conference of Religious in Ireland (CORI).
Father Healy was responding to the controversy over social welfare fraud revealed by the discrepancy, between the Labour Force Survey: and the Live Register.
He told The Irish Times that he could not comment on the study until he had seen it. "It was wrong of the Government to release the figures until it had released the study. This does not enable informed comment", he said.
However, he suggested that the National Economic and Social Forum should be asked to bring together everybody who had figures on employment and unemployment to enable a consensus to be reached.
On fraud, he pointed out that CORI had been saying for 15 years that the existing social welfare system was an inadequate mechanism. "It was designed for a world that is gone, which existed after World War Two", he said. "It was a world in which there was near full employment, one job per household, in which a job was supposed to pay, the family wages and women were not part of the workforce. All of these are gone.
"There are people employed and people not employed. The employed get tax allowances and the unemployed get social welfare. There are a huge amount of poverty and unemployment traps between tax and social welfare.
"The introduction of a basic income guarantee, whereby every man, woman and child would get a basic income, whether employed or not, which would replace social welfare and the tax allowance, would mean that there would never again be a poverty trap."
Father Healy suggested that the basic income should be about £70 for each adult and £21 for each child. A proportion of everything earned above that would go to the worker and another proportion would go to the State in tax.
"It can be paid for with a lower rate of income tax than the present marginal tax rate of 50 per cent", he said. "It would also eliminate fraud, because everyone would have one RSI number, which could not be ripped off."