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.