Irish Examiner view: We all suffer in abuse of system

Social Protection ‘overspend’

The Department of Social Protection, with a budget last year of over €23bn, has a presence in every corner of the country and keeping its books balanced is clearly a mammoth challenge. Picture: Denis Minihane

We learned yesterday that over €111m was overpaid by the Department of Social Protection last year, with more than half of that sum being attributed to customer error.

To be precise, ‘customer error’ covers almost €70m, while over €19m of the total is related to suspected fraud.

It is worth acknowledging that a Government department which, by definition, is paying out vast sums of money is bound to experience errors and irregularities. 

The Department of Social Protection, with a budget last year of over €23bn, has a presence in every corner of the country and keeping its books balanced is clearly a mammoth challenge.

Overpaying by over €100m is still a significant error, but it’s worth pointing out that the catch-all term ‘customer error’ is also used to cover approximately €17m associated with Covid-related cases. 

The majority of those cases involve the pandemic unemployment payment (Pup) and instances of customers returning to work and continuing to claim the Pup.

Using ‘customer error’ to describe such interactions seems a benevolent reading of the circumstances. 

While the Department of Social Protection should be held to account for its mistakes, it is notable that clearly there are plenty of customers content to take payments they are not entitled to.

In doing so, they are taking the money raised by taxes for the benefit of all — that means not just social welfare recipients but hospital patients, schoolchildren, the elderly, all of the sectors of the population reliant on the Government for support. Those abusing the system in this way deserve more criticism than those operating that system.

The issue with PUP payments also serves to underline the urgency of another issue — any such inquiry into overpayments under this scheme needs to form part of an overall inquiry into the handling of the pandemic. 

Any such inquiry needs to identify problems arising in the fight against Covid which can be avoided if a similar situation arises in the future.