Man admits €1m social welfare fraud (33 years)

Purple said:
Why would you think that?!
We'd have to have some sort of a Personal Public Services number or some such thing for that to work...
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I think you might be onto something there! I'm thinking a unique string that could identify someone. Maybe we could go with your name and call it a PPS number? It could be used for a plethora of things come to think of it...
 
There is much more of this type of crime going on than most think. The guy involved here is from Cork and the last one I read about was about a woman scamming the Dept of Social Welfare and she was from Cork also. From my own experience with the Dept of Social Welfare over many years, I reckon what we know of this type of fraud is only the tip of the iceberg.

I have read newspaper articles with somebody representing our President (usually an army officer) and visiting some of the homes of people 100+ of age with the Presidential Cheque only to find the person had died years previously.

While the PPS number is eminently important these days; it was not too important not so many years ago. I bet some of those who received Presidential Cheques also had received Death Grants previously.
 
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Firefly said:
I think you might be onto something there! I'm thinking a unique string that could identify someone. Maybe we could go with your name and call it a PPS number? It could be used for a plethora of things come to think of it...
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Yea, like a unique patient identifier in all hospitals.
 
Firefly said:
How can this happen? Surely if someone dies, their records in the Department of Social Protection are updated and the dole is then not paid to dead people?
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In theory once the GRO is notified of a death they send it to DSP to stop any payments. This process is probably not perfect, as there can be issues with use of middle names, maiden names, old addresses etc. It may have been done manually in the past as well and things fell through the cracks.

If you were setting up a welfare system from scratch tomorrow it would involve payments by bank transfer and nothing else. It would cut down on fraud but that's not where we are starting from.

There is the "social inclusion" argument that the poor are not very capable and it is just simplest to let them wander into their local post office once a week. I am sympathetic to this. Not having a national ID system makes fraud much easier too.

In cases like this I often wonder how much the post office staff knew. In these cases often the son has the same first name as the deceased father but you'd wonder how he got away with claiming the mother's pension too.......
 
I presume it is easily done if you don't register the death? Hence the state has no formal record of a person dying and nothing gets passed to the DSP.
 
NoRegretsCoyote said:
In theory once the GRO is notified of a death they send it to DSP to stop any payments. This process is probably not perfect, as there can be issues with use of middle names, maiden names, old addresses etc. It may have been done manually in the past as well and things fell through the cracks.

If you were setting up a welfare system from scratch tomorrow it would involve payments by bank transfer and nothing else. It would cut down on fraud but that's not where we are starting from.

There is the "social inclusion" argument that the poor are not very capable and it is just simplest to let them wander into their local post office once a week. I am sympathetic to this. Not having a national ID system makes fraud much easier too.

In cases like this I often wonder how much the post office staff knew. In these cases often the son has the same first name as the deceased father but you'd wonder how he got away with claiming the mother's pension too.......
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Would a national ID system really help? Last time I looked, the €60 million Public Services Card project has saved us €2 million or €3 million in fraud, which seems like a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
 
RetirementPlan said:
Would a national ID system really help? Last time I looked, the €60 million Public Services Card project has saved us €2 million or €3 million in fraud, which seems like a bit of a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
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The ID card could be used for many other things as well but we already have a unique identifier; our PPS number. Why's that not just added to the Death Cert?
 
RetirementPlan said:
Would a national ID system really help?
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Yes. It cuts down on lots of opportunity for fraud and reduces error. I know someone only in her 40s who has (and claims to use) two PPS numbers.

A national ID system exists in lots of European countries and the sky doesn't cave in.
 
NoRegretsCoyote said:
Yes. It cuts down on lots of opportunity for fraud and reduces error. I know someone only in her 40s who has (and claims to use) two PPS numbers.

A national ID system exists in lots of European countries and the sky doesn't cave in.
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What would the national ID system provide on top of the current Public Services Card to reduce fraud? Maybe a better option would be for you to report your contact with the two PPS numbers rather than building a whole new system at a cost of tens or hundreds of millions?
 
RetirementPlan said:
What would the national ID system provide on top of the current Public Services Card to reduce fraud?
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Where you have ambiguity or duplication you provide for the possibility of fraud.

I would develop the PSC into something where everyone has a unique profile (with address via eircode) that is used for a range of state services. No more data entry when you want to pay motor tax, register for a school, go to hospital.

An obligation to update your address as well would make it easier as well to cut down on fraud. Whenever this is mooted all sorts of spurious civil liberties issues are raised, and none of the practical benefits ever pointed to.



Eircode is a great example. Before it was introduced it had legions of naysayers saying the design was wrong. Newspaper articles focussed only on the costs and not the benefits. Since its introduction in 2016 it has had massive take-up and lots of people in rural Ireland say they couldn't live without it as it makes deliveries so much easier.
 
NoRegretsCoyote said:
Where you have ambiguity or duplication you provide for the possibility of fraud.

I would develop the PSC into something where everyone has a unique profile (with address via eircode) that is used for a range of state services. No more data entry when you want to pay motor tax, register for a school, go to hospital.

An obligation to update your address as well would make it easier as well to cut down on fraud. Whenever this is mooted all sorts of spurious civil liberties issues are raised, and none of the practical benefits ever pointed to.
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Something like the MyGovID perhaps?

The civil liberties issues that I recall being raised were about the obligation to carry an ID card, but maybe there's more to the discussion. HSE IT are also working on the single health identifier too.

There are real questions about how our data is shared and managed though. Government data breaches are not that unusual, as we've seen with the HSE, Aardhar in India, US voter records, Swedish transportation agency and more. Integrating legacy systems under a common authentication layer like this is a very substantial issue, so be prepared to redirect large amounts of the limited IT budgets away from new functions and services into this internal plumbing for a generation or so.

Fully agree about the benefits of Eircode. Is that poor oul losing tenderer still naysaying at every opportunity, like King Canute?
 
RetirementPlan said:
HSE IT are also working on the single health identifier too.
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Ideally there would be only one system!

RetirementPlan said:
There are real questions about how our data is shared and managed though. Government data breaches are not that unusual, as we've seen with the HSE, Aardhar in India, US voter records, Swedish transportation agency and more.
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Sure, you need to have adequate safeguards in place to prevent breaches and restrict access. Having multiple non-connected databases is one way of doing this, but probably not the most efficient.
 
RetirementPlan said:
Is that easily done? Would the doctor or Gardai or hospital have any role here?
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What should happen is the Doctor or Hospital should fill out a Death Notification form (certifying the death) which is then used by the next of kin to register the death. However, if someone died at home of natural causes and no doctor was called to certify death and they were not getting treated by a doctor, then it would and could be easy enough to not register the death. In effect, if no one knows you are dead........

Alternatively, I don't know if anyone checks to see if a Death notification form has been linked to a registered death or not.
 
Peanuts20 said:
What should happen is the Doctor or Hospital should fill out a Death Notification form (certifying the death) which is then used by the next of kin to register the death. However, if someone died at home of natural causes and no doctor was called to certify death and they were not getting treated by a doctor, then it would and could be easy enough to not register the death. In effect, if no one knows you are dead........

Alternatively, I don't know if anyone checks to see if a Death notification form has been linked to a registered death or not.
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Just curious, are there many cases of deaths NOT certified by a doctor? Is that even legal? Would an undertaker proceed with burial without a doctor's cert?
 
Peanuts20 said:
What should happen is the Doctor or Hospital should fill out a Death Notification form (certifying the death) which is then used by the next of kin to register the death. However, if someone died at home of natural causes and no doctor was called to certify death and they were not getting treated by a doctor, then it would and could be easy enough to not register the death. In effect, if no one knows you are dead........

Alternatively, I don't know if anyone checks to see if a Death notification form has been linked to a registered death or not.
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It is a legal requirement that a death is registered in this country. A doctor must sign the form. If they cannot determine the cause of death a Postmortem must be carried out.
 
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