Welfare fraud claims a distraction as economy burns

I AGREE with Liam Power (Letters, Dec 31) about the “welfare fraud bandwagon”.

The Government is the modern-day Nero in the empire of the latest spin. They harmonise on their lyres to distract us while the economy burns. They scorch everybody except the sacred bondholders. Ministers now stridently gloat about how they might save half a billion euro on social welfare fraud in 2012. Those projected savings will equal only a half of 1% of our bailout. The troika demands €100bn. Do they want us to default on all social welfare payments? Every week, the Department of “what used to be Social Welfare” makes 1.4m payments to help 2.1m poor people. The gross expenditure amounted to about €20.5bn for all 2011. Knocking €0.5bn off that figure would save less than 2.5% of all monies paid. That indicates that 97.5% of all claims are honest. People who are new to poverty are not familiar with the social welfare system. As a result, they tend to underclaim their statutory entitlements. Ministers should quantify and broadcast these “savings” which, in effect, tend to balance somewhat the total amount lost through fraud.& Threatening honest people with ever-growing fear is not in the spirit of caring with compassion. We need to clarify the funny numbers of imaginary money. I look forward to the annual report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. That office has always excelled in dealing impartially with the facts.

Michael Mernagh