Oireachtas Joint and Select Committees
Thursday, 20 October 2016
Public Accounts Committee
2015 Annual Report of the Comptroller and Auditor General and Appropriation Accounts
Vote 37 - Department of Social Protection
Chapter 9 - Regularity of Social Welfare Payments
Chapter 10 - Roll-out of the Public Services Card
Social Insurance Fund 2015
9:00 am
Peter Burke (Longford-Westmeath, Fine Gael) | Oireachtas source
I thank the staff of the Department for presenting their response to the report of the Comptroller and Auditor General. Obviously, the Department is a major spending Department. I wish to focus on a few of the areas that the Comptroller and Auditor General has drawn attention to. When one adopts a sense of materiality within the whole Department, some areas can seem more concerning than they actually are. I fully appreciate that in terms of carrying out audits.
I understand that 1.6 million people receive a payment each week from the Department. Therefore, the scale is huge. The Department introduced a new debt-receipts accounting system in November 2014. Could Ms O'Donoghue confirm the cost of the system introduced? Who provided the system and how much internal resources were put in place to ensure it could go live and run effectively?
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