Burton: Welfare claimants to receive ID cards

SOCIAL welfare claimants will begin receiving national identity cards in the coming months in an attempt to stamp out fraud and dole system abuse, which could be costing as much as €600 million a year.

Social Protection Minister Joan Burton announced the move yesterday while setting out plans to reduce her department’s bill for paying utility supplements for welfare recipients.

At the MacGill Summer School in Donegal, Ms Burton said the national social insurance card would have biometric identification through the use of a photograph.

“The department has been working on this for a number of years now. We propose to begin the rollout of this on a pilot basis in the autumn and that will provide a much higher level of security in relation to the identity of people who are collecting social welfare payments and it should make a very big step forward combating fraud and abuse.”

The card will eventually apply to everybody who has a PPS number and who receives social welfare payments. Claimants including pensioners will be included in the trial period.

There are also plans for a social welfare fraud squad, which could be in place by September.

This would allow claimants to be assessed by inspectors, who, until now, have been landed with desk work because of the rising numbers of unemployed people.

Ms Burton said: “They will be able to go out and visit employers and visit individuals and actually be there in the frontline against fraud.”

According to international research, between 1% and 3% of welfare claimants abuse the system. This means that up to €600m in claims a year could be going to people abusing the system, she added.

Ms Burton also said negotiations were ongoing with utility suppliers, among others, to reduce the bill for supplements for welfare claimants.

“I was a bit surprised as minister to find that social welfare pays something like €750m for utility payments like gas, energy, travel passes and TV lic-ences. We don’t really get much in the way of bulk discounts even though we’re a very large-scale purchaser of utility services.”

She said the department is paying a supplement of €2 per month to rent phone handsets from Eircom for individual welfare claimants. “That seems a bit pricey to me.”

Ms Burton outlined how the total social welfare bill had grown from €7.8 billion in 2001 to over €20bn last year, an increase of 266%.

She said welfare system models in Nordic countries and Latin America had acted only as temporary supports for people in difficult economic circumstances.

Ireland needed to look at these systems because incentives to get people off welfare and back to work here had so far failed, she said.