Students overpaid €4m in grant money by SUSI
Third-level students were overpaid more than €4m in grant money during the 2012/13 academic year, it has emerged.
Susi — the body which oversees the payment of all third-level grants — has admitted that a total of €3.7m was paid out in error to 1,300 students who were ineligible to receive certain fee and maintenance grants. It represents an average overpayment of €2,850 per student.
Susi wrote to effected students to advise them they might be liable to repay the money once the problem was identified in 2014.
However, no money was recovered and it is currently seeking approval from the Department of Education to write off the total amount.
The organisation also revealed that further overpayments worth €309,981 were made to students in 2012/13 who were eligible for grants but who failed to have satisfactory attendance records or who had withdrawn from their courses.
Just €32,275 of this figure had been recovered by the end of November 2014. Susi, which emerged from the student grants unit of the City of Dublin VEC, has been the single awarding body for all new third-level and post-Leaving Certificate student grants since 2012
The chairman of the City of Dublin Education and Training Board (which replaced the CDVEC), Paddy Bourke, said an internal quality review of awarded grants by Susi had highlighted overpayments in grants paid out in 2012/13.
The review identified overpayments amounting to €3,705,561, representing 2.5% of total grant expenditure by Susi that year.
Overpayments were established in three distinct classes of students:
was paid in maintenance grants to students who were already in receipt of the Back to Education Allowance;
was paid in fee grants to post-graduate students assessed on the basis of independent applicant class, when they were receiving financial support from their families;
was paid in fee and maintenance grants to non-EU students
Mr Bourke said: “The quality review indicated these overpayments were attributable to limitations on the availability of data needed to validate information provided by applicants and the effectiveness of controls implemented to ensure that applications were assessed fully in accordance with certain complex provisions of the student grant scheme.”
Susi subsequently did not renew grants in the academic year 2013/14 to students who had previously being paid a maintenance grant, despite already being in receipt of a Back to Education Allowance. Fee and maintenance grants previously paid in error to non-EU students were discontinued.
Mr Bourke, an independent member of Dublin City Council, said new and enhanced data and information sharing arrangements with other government departments and agencies were introduced for the 2013/14 academic year to improve methods of validating grant applications.
The last accounts of the CDVEC show it also overpaid €43,795 to part-time teachers in 2012/13 — most of which it accepted was likely to be written off as bad debt.
A Susi spokesperson said it had introduced major improvements in how it validated grant applications. “We are satisfied that it is a historic problem and one that will not recur. It affected 1,300 students out of 70,000 who received grants.”
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