Welfare system can abuse the most vulnerable

IN the current issue of the Bord Failte publication, Ireland of the Welcomes, whose quality proves that you shouldn't judge a magazine by its title, the novelist John McGahern tells the story of the Fenagh phonebox. The Leitrim village has two pubs that face each other across the only street, one of them Fine Gael, the other Fianna Fail. With every change of government, the phonebox - the nearest thing to a public amenity - used to rise and shift itself 30 yards from one side of the street to the other. Now, it stays put. The public telephone," writes McGahern, is no longer the potent symbol of power it once was, and governments now change too often."

It must have been rather reassuring to be able to tell who was in power by looking to see which side of the road the phonebox was on. These days, power is harder to define, not least because the amount of information we have is, in an increasingly complex society, increasingly inadequate.

Yet again this week, with the CSO study on welfare fraud, we are reminded how little we actually know about the place we live in. It is important to remember that it is not just in the black economy that books are cooked and the facts are riddled with fictions.

On paper, for instance, output and productivity in Irish based multinationals doubled in the period from 1987 to 1993. It sounded like great news until someone pointed out that the difference in productivity between Irish owned companies and multinationals was, as the American economist Charles Sabel put it, "almost too striking to be plausible".

In the top 10 Irish owned companies average output per employee in 1993 was £128,000. In the top 10 Irish based multinationals average output per employee in 1993 was £814,000.

The main explanation for the discrepancy is that the figures for the multinationals are largely fictional: they habitually juggle the figures to increase the level of profitability of their Irish branches and take advantage of our low corporate taxes.

Or consider wealth. When Combat Poverty tried to estimate the wealth of Irish households in 1991, it produced an excellent report by Brian Nolan, the first sentence of which is, "Little is known about the wealth of Irish households and the forms in which it is held." The best source of data - the household income surveys - misses the top 1 per cent of the population, which is "particularly elusive in such surveys, being less likely than other households to respond".

Brian Nolan noted that "the nature of the data rules out meaningful results on the top wealth holders". Is it any wonder that whenever there is a tax amnesty or whenever a financial asset manager flees the country, money suddenly starts to look very funny?

THERE are whole areas of the legitimate economy in which playing things by the book is taken as a sure sign of idiocy. Larry Goodman's reaction to the fact that his companies were caught paying workers under the counter, for instance, was not contrition but a genuine anger that he was being "singled out" when everyone knew that what was being done was common practice.

The collusion of unscrupulous employers who use social welfare as an unofficial subsidy to allow them to pay poverty wages doesn't excuse the small scale cheats. But it does suggest that the problem of welfare fraud can't be tackled in isolation. We have to remember three things. Firstly, welfare fraud is part of a culture sanctioned and sustained by the rich and powerful.

Secondly, it happens in a context where welfare payments are only now reaching the level defined as the basic minimum by the Commission on Social Welfare 10 years ago and where it is impossible to live on welfare alone. And thirdly, abuse of the welfare system goes two ways.

There is another side of the social welfare ripoff story: the ripping off of people who are entitled to benefits and don't get them. Studies undertaken by voluntary agencies such as the Free Legal Advice Centres always show that large numbers of people, often those in the most need, don't know what they are entitled to and don't claim their full benefits.

Often those who do claim have to deal with bureaucratic obtuseness. The annual report of the Ombudsman's office for last year says that half of all complaints about the Civil Service related to social welfare issues. It also cites some cases that should be borne in mind.

There is the woman who was refused deserted wife's benefit on the grounds that neither she nor her husband had a sufficient record of social insurance payments. The requirement was for 156 contributions - her husband had paid 155. But he had also paid social insurance in the UK. Only after the intervention of the Ombudsman was it agreed that the woman was entitled under European law to have the contributions made in the UK taken into account. She had been denied - £6,000 in arrears to which she was entitled.

Or take the case of the 87 year old man who had been claiming the old age pension. In 1993, 20 years after he had started to draw the pension, an official of the Department of Social Welfare mentioned to him that he should have been claiming for an adult dependant - his wife - since 1974. Yet, hen he went looking for the back money, the Department refused to give it to him.

WHEN the Ombudsman took up the case, the Department agreed to give him what he was owed since 1985, on the rather bizarre grounds that a pensions officer had visited him in 1985 on a separate matter and should have told him then what his correct entitlement was. But the Department refused numerous suggestions from the Ombudsman that it should pay the poor man what he was owed for the period from 1974 to 1985.

Only when it was informed that the Ombudsman was instituting a formal investigation into the affair did the Department begin a "further review" of the case and decide to cough up the back money. How many other pensioners go to their graves without discovering that they are not getting their full welfare entitlements?

We need to police the system not just to catch the cheats, but to give more help to the most vulnerable. What we don't need is to run away with the notion that there are vast numbers of decent jobs out there just waiting for lazy welfare bums to get up off their backsides and on to their bikes.

It is worth bearing in mind, for instance, that in the last few years the Civil Service Commission received 8,500 applications for 1,000 jobs as clerical assistant, a job with the princely starting salary of £150 a week for those under 19 and £165 for those over 20. Dublin Corporation received 15,000 applications for 90 positions on its clerical panel. Six poorly paid jobs as ushers in Government offices attracted 1,946 eager applicants. These people are not the cheats but the cheated, done out of their right to contribute to the society of which they are a central part.