Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 16 January 2013
505. Deputy Robert Dowds asked the Minister for Social Protection the vetting or inspection that takes place of persons in receipt of carers' payments, or who have applied for such payments, to ensure that they are acting as carers. [1429/13]
View answerCarer's Allowance is a social assistance payment made to persons who are providing full-time care and attention to elderly people or to people with disabilities and whose income falls below certain limits. The principal conditions for receipt of the allowance are that full-time care and attention is required and being provided, that the means test which applies is satisfied and that the applicant is habitually resident in the State.
The application form for carer’s allowance includes a section concerning the requirement of the care recipient for full time care and attention, this part must be certified by the care recipient’s treating physician, normally their G.P. The application form also requests information from the applicant in respect of all of the other conditions. If any information is omitted or is unclear, a deciding officer may request supplementary information from the applicant or may forward the file to a social welfare inspector for further investigation. Once the supplementary information is provided or the inspector returns a report and on completion of all the necessary investigation, a deciding officer will make an overall decision on the applicant’s eligibility for carer’s allowance.
For the carers allowance scheme, a programme of control reviews is carried out annually to ensure on-going entitlement. Customers are selected for review according to the risk of their circumstances changing, either in terms of medical eligibility, changes in their means or other changes of circumstances that may affect their entitlement. In addition, reviews are also undertaken arising from various data matching exercises carried out where the Department’s data is compared to relevant data held by, for example, Revenue, the Private Rental Tenancies Board and the General Registrar’s Office. Control reviews are also carried out, as appropriate, in response to anonymous reports received from the public. In 2012, over 19,000 reviews were carried out on carer’s allowance cases.
