Rise in welfare fraud tip-offs

Members of the public provided more than 7,000 tip-offs to the Department of Social Protection about possible cases of welfare fraud in the first eight months of the year.

The department, which processes more than two million claims each year, said 4,029 of these had come through its website, 2,523 had been received over the phone and 713 had come through the post.

Former secretary general of the department Bernadette Lacey told an Oireachtas committee earlier this year that an estimated €660 million a year was lost to social welfare fraud or error.

Last year, 7,000 reports of alleged fraud were received, and one in six tip-offs from the public helped to identify welfare fraud. Over €480 million was saved as a result of investigations stemming from this information.

The department hopes to retrieve some €530 million through fraud inquiries and control measures this year.

The number of tip-offs received has increased more than fivefold since 2008, when 1,044 were received.

Referring to this year’s figures, the department said it was not always possible to review the complaint due to lack of information or no claim being in payment.

“In other instances information reported would not impact on entitlement. In the remaining cases a report of suspected fraud was sent to the relevant area for examination,” a spokeswoman said.

She added that social networking sites such as Facebook, Twitter and Bebo were occasionally used to follow up on reports of alleged fraud but that these were “not a systematic part of the department’s ongoing fraud and error control activities”.