Debt of the dead: deceased owe €31m
THE Department of Employment and Social Protection is owed €31m by dead people who were overpaid.
The department had a total of 9,275 debts relating to the deceased on its books at the end of last year.
The report also shows that six welfare overpayments of more than €200,000 were made – one claimant who owed €333,463 at the end of last year got a five-year jail sentence for impersonation.
The portion of overpayments due to fraud or suspected fraud fell from 49pc in 2013 to 37pc last year. However, there was a rise in errors by claimants.
In the same period, the department recorded overpayments worth between €100m and €120m a year, and the level of debt rose from €420m to €482m, while welfare spending fell by 9pc.
Meanwhile, civil servants owed the State at least €4.6m at the end of 2016 because of salary overpayments that had not been returned.
Many of the payments arose because the centralised payroll division was only told that an employee on sick leave was on reduced or zero pay after a payroll was processed.
But, a probe by the C&AG also reveals a fundamental miscalculation in how absences have been recorded, which meant that some overpayments were not even on the radar.
The miscalculation is happening within the Department of Public Expenditure (Deper).
The details are set out in a report on the management of salary overpayments by the National Shared Services Office (NSSO), a division of Deper.
Value
The NSSO delivers payroll services, mainly for civil service departments. Of €4.6m of overpayments outstanding at the end of 2016, there were no plans then in place for the recovery of €2.8m. There were another 648 cases where overpayments were identified, but not quantified, with an estimated overall value of €650,000.
The report also highlights two ways in which overpayments are occurring, which were not being captured by the NSSO.
It refers to changes in payroll rules in 2011, which meant that staff on fortnightly salaries would have an absence calculated as one-10th of pay, but the NSSO calculated deductions at the rate of one-14th.
“As the rate of deduction using this method is less, an overpayment occurs each time but it is not currently recorded,” the report states. According to the C&AG, the NSSO is in discussions with Deper and “clarification of the deduction rule is being sought”.