A crackdown on social welfare fraudsters has helped to recoup in excess of €1.1 million in County Galway.
The Department of Social Protection confirmed that its investigators recovered some €1.113 million from bogus benefits claims as well as overpayments last year.
The clawback relates to overpayments and suspected fraud in Galway in relation to all sorts of State benefits including Jobseekers Allowance, Invalidity Pensions, Child Benefit and Carers Allowance.
The county split as to how much of the €1.1 million was fraud and how much was overpayments was not available.
However, the suspected social welfare fraud and overpayments in 2015 amounted to €4.66 for every person living in Galway city and county.
Social Protection Minister Leo Varadkar said that nationally, the overall provisional level of overpayments recorded in 2015 amounted to €115.4m in respect of 81,600 individual overpayments.
Overpayments attributable to fraud came to approximately €48.9m in respect of 21,407 individual cases, he said.
Minister Varadkar said the Department’s Compliance and Anti-Fraud Strategy 2014-2018, “provides for a range of measures to ensure that social welfare fraud and abuse is minimised and that control activity is appropriately focused.”
A progress report on this strategy was published in April and he said the emphasis “continues to be on preventing fraud and error from entering the system, improving detections and minimising error.”
Minister Varadkar added: “In recent years, a number of legislative provisions have been introduced to strengthen the Department’s capacity to recover debt. A new debt management system was also introduced at the end of 2014.
“The Department’s policy is to pursue prosecutions in cases of fraud, where appropriate. Fraud prevention, detection and control systems are subject to continuing development to take account of new areas of fraud and technological advances.”
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