JOINT COMMITTEE ON JOBS, SOCIAL PROTECTION AND EDUCATION díospóireacht -
Wednesday, 29 Feb 2012

Use of ICT: Discussion with Department of Social Protection

Chairman

We will now deal with information technology delivery and proposed processing of social welfare services, with specific reference to the development of a national database. I welcome our guests from the Department of Social Protection, Mr. Niall Barry, assistant secretary, Ms Teresa Leonard, principal officer, Mr. Darragh O'Connor, principal officer, and Ms Catherine Connellan, principal officer.

Members are reminded of the long-standing parliamentary practice to the effect that members should not comment on, criticise or make charges against a person outside the House or an official by name or in such a way as to make him or her identifiable.

By virtue of section 17(2)(l) of the Defamation Act 2009, witnesses are protected by absolute privilege in respect of the evidence you are to give this committee. If you are directed by the committee to cease giving evidence in relation to a particular matter and you continue to so do, you are entitled thereafter only to a qualified privilege in respect of your evidence. You are directed that only evidence connected with the subject matter of these proceedings is to be given and you are asked to respect the parliamentary practice to the effect that, where possible, you should not criticise nor make charges against any person(s) or entity by name or in such a way as to make him, her or it identifiable.

I know Mr. Barry is familiar with the privilege speech and I invite him to make his presentation.

Mr. Niall Barry

I am pleased to be here and I am grateful for the invitation and the opportunity to set out how ICT is used in the Department of Social Protection and to correct some of the misinformation floating around, particularly in the media, about the capability of the Department's systems. We are justifiably proud of the systems' capability and I hope members will share the view when they see the detail of what we do.

The Department's computer systems have attracted adverse attention in the media over the past number of months. I will set out the position under a number of headings before addressing the national database issue. It is sometimes forgotten that the Department's systems are very reliable by any standard. If we fail to make scheduled payments, there would be huge outcry and everyone in this room would be well aware that we had not done our primary duty of continuing the production system. This is where we put the majority of resources.

It is difficult to appreciate the scale of the business so I will present some general indication of the volume we deal with as a matter of course. I am using the most recent published figures from 2010. There are more recent figures available but we are still working on their publication. Seeing as we are talking about scale, using figures from 2010 is not an issue. Mr. O'Connor will later refer to the fact that there are 1.4 million weekly recipients of payments and 87 million payments every year. Every day, there are 250,000 payments made and, as with any large system, there are glitches. However, we do not fail to make payments, which is the chief criterion. In 2010, 10 million forms and 7 million cheques were produced. The figure for cheques reduced to 6 million in 2011. We could not cope with the growth in our workload over the past number of years unless these systems were working reliably.

I will provide other indicators of the scale of operations of the Department. We have shifted from dumb terminals to PCs and at the moment we have in excess of 8,000 PCs on our network. We have more servers then we have staff in the information systems division, which is typical of most modern operations. The volume of printers is quite high although we are trying to tail those off and we are doing better than the national average, if recent figures are to be believed. There is a massive growth in storage over the past number of years. From a relatively small amount, the figure has exploded.

Our infrastructure comprises two data centres and an extensive network. While the merging of community welfare service staff and FÁS staff will enable significant changes in service delivery in the future, the more immediate effect is the dramatic expansion of our nationwide locations. Although some of them are very small, we now have over 1,000 locations nationwide to service through ICT. Another indicator of size is the number of telephones we have to deal with. There are over 5,000 telephones and we are exploring opportunities to cut down the cost of telecommunications. Like everyone else, we are becoming critically dependent on telecommunications.

We have a strong focus on customer and client service and I ask Mr. O'Connor to take us through the relevant facts.

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

The Department touches the life of everyone at some stage. We provide supports in a way that meets the needs of people, some of whom are very dependent on us. Someone 1.4 million customers are paid weekly and when we include monthly payments, it is equivalent to 1.7 million payment transactions every week. Our systems have passed the test of time. We provide services over a range of contact channels, including telephony, SMS messages, online and walk-in. We also have automated processes to eliminate or reduce the need for customers to contact us. These include a process with the General Register Office for life events so that when a child is born it is automatically registered in our systems. For second and subsequent children, the payment is issued automatically. We have automated communication with jobseekers and automated certification, such as education certificates and child benefit payments to some 100,000 people a year. We have a fully accessible website and we had some 4 million visitors to the website last year, including 81,000 customers using the online services. A further 34,000 customers use the SMS service. The website includes local office pages, Google maps, noticeboards, online forums and access to services. We get some 6.5 million telephone calls every year and we have modern contact centre management software in our headquarter building contact centres to help us manage those peaks. There is significant contact with customers.

We mentioned the regional headquarters and the local offices. We process some 48,000 applications each week in our headquarters and in our network of local offices. As well as the business support systems that we have in place, we also have modern office systems, based on the Microsoft tool set, to support staff. On this product, we have also developed additional business and administrative supports for staff, including knowledge bases, team sites, discussion boards and other customer service supports. Customer service is at the heart of what we do and we will continue to adapt our processes and ICT systems to support the public service reform agenda.

Mr. Niall Barry

As Mr. O'Connor mentioned, we are positioning ourselves to support public service reform and it is clear that the mission of the Department is evolving over the years. We had previously concentrated in the Department on income support but our environment has considerably changed. We now expect our clients to take a more active role in society, both for their own sake and to help the overall national recovery. This means that we need to grow the business to support our more active support role while also responding in a better way to the necessity to minimise fraud in the system.

The evolving mission requires that the supporting systems and processes must change and evolve in a corresponding fashion. As one can see, we have been evolving for the past number of years and we will continue to do this while supporting the core business process of the Department.

The next slide is a busy one, and my apologies for that. I am trying to give the committee some idea of the various areas in which the Department is working which consequently need ICT support. The first two headings on the slide represent the current chief political imperatives, which is to deal with activation of the workforce and fraud control, but one can see from the rest of the slide that there is a focus on a range of matters in order to support those. Under what is currently being called NEES, the national employment and entitlements service, there is a number of different projects to do with case management, modernising our local offices, new ways of registration, and profiling and certification both of which have been mentioned, and also the supporting infrastructure, which involves much work.

While we are doing those quite visible tasks, it is also important to point out that underneath there is a significant programme of reform of the social protection system itself. We have significant policy initiatives under way in each of the standard life-cycle areas as well as our relatively new focus on employers, with the incursion of FÁS into the system. While we are progressing those headline items, we are still playing our role within the public service in terms of providing information to other bodies, both nationally and internationally, particularly on identity services, to which I will return later, and means. For example, the electronic exchange of social security information, EESSI, is a pan-European project to exchange social security information. Therefore, we have a considerable body of work to support the internal administration and provision of computing facilities in the Department.

As is evident in the increased talk about shared services nationally, and we use quite a deal of shared services, other agencies expect us to provide services to them. As one can see from the list, we have an extensive workload and all are getting progressed in some way. The key to this is our ability to respond to demands for new services in an agile fashion. Ms Leonard will elaborate on that.

Ms Teresa Leonard

We, as a Department, have a proven track record of developing and delivering innovative systems at pace. We have done this over the past number of years and we take considerable pride in what we have done.

Our new IT system is known as the business object model implementation, BOMI. In conjunction with the redesign of our business processes, procedures and organisational structures, it delivers key business benefits and each time we add to that system, we build on the object model. These developments allow us to be more agile in responding to the changes in Government policy and customer needs. Our aim is to provide a cost-effective, efficient and comprehensive service based around our customers while also providing a much improved working environment for our staff.

The next slide, which also is a busy slide, gives an indication of the work we have been doing over the past number of years on our new platform. There are over 40 major developments since 2006 represented on that slide. One of the key points is that each time, we build on what we built previously. We keep reusing core pieces of that architecture and build new additional services on it. As we move through it, one will find that we have got faster in our delivery of service and we deliver at pace.

In conjunction with what is on that slide as individual services, we still do budget changes each year and we accommodate them on this platform. We do monthly releases, which are a substantial piece of work. In the past six years, we probably have not done a monthly release only on three occasions.

We build and we reuse. I will pick out some of the schemes which that particular innovation represents. If I start in 2006 with State pension, transition, and State pension, contributor, that is, SPT and SPC, respectively, on the slide, those are our contributor pensions. We built that piece of development with 215,000 customers on those schemes. We now support 315,000 on those self-same schemes without any increase in staff. This particular development brings administrative savings to our organisation and gives us the capacity to continue to support the business within the resources allocated to us.

I will skip to individualisation, which happened in 2007. Individualisation was an implementation to respond to a Government policy that qualified adults would be paid individually on pension claims and that development would support that. Claim initiation, the same year, allowed us as an organisation to go to customers and invite them at pension age to apply for their pensions proactively, which is in the interests of good customer service and our customers.

Certification was done in 2007. This is a major control initiative for our organisation. That development allows us to make major control savings each year as a consequence. I suppose e-payments also brought us cost savings and innovation because it reduced the number of manual payments we were making and supported electronic payments.

I will move down to 2009. On UK pensions, we are required under EU legislation to support our EU colleagues in the provision of records to EU countries. The UK has pension age at 60 and we have an obligation to supply them with records early. This particular development allowed us to automate that process in conjunction with the central records section of the Department. It brought considerable administrative savings but also efficiencies to our colleagues in the EU, and means that we respond efficiently and quickly to their needs.

I will jump forward to activation, in 2010-2011. It supports the initiative to which Mr. Barry referred earlier where we work on profiling and case management of our customer base.

JA Online offers support for our local offices at a time when the numbers on the local offices were under pressure because of increased numbers on unemployment. We developed initiatives on our business object model to support those schemes at that point as well. Means, also in 2011, refers to a scheme that does means across all our schemes and, in time, may be possible to share across organisations. Moving through to the last one, the public services card was brought in last year. The roll-out of that public services card has started and it is supported as well on the business object model.

I will concentrate briefly on one of the schemes we introduced in 2011, that is, the redundancy and solvency scheme from the Department of Jobs, Enterprise and Innovation. We developed an end-to-end system within a four-month period to support those schemes in from another organisation, which is a major piece of work to be done in a short period. It reflects our ability to react and respond quickly with our IT systems.

The programme for Government recognises our ability to adopt and deliver. Combined with our proven track record of responding to all challenges, we are confident we will continue to develop and expand our IT platform and it will deliver on our Department's and the Government's agenda in the future.

Mr. Niall Barry

Delivering that level of productivity requires a strong capacity to deliver within the Department, and Mr. O'Connor will address that topic as well.

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

The next slide states that delivery requires both technical and business capacity working in close collaboration. Our IS division has a total staff of 223 full-time equivalents. This has decreased from a cadre of 305 ten years ago. We have capable IT people who know and understand our business. In this way, we maintain continuity and knowledge of the overall systems architecture design. The complexity and uniqueness of our schemes and services require a deep understanding of our systems and processes. All of our reform projects are led by a business project manager using an agile approach, as Mr. Barry mentioned. This approach involves co-operation between business and IT divisions and it is recognised internationally as a means of reducing risk in the delivery of projects.

We have built and are building internal capacity and we supplement this with external supports. We are committed to reducing dependency on external support, as outlined in our public service reform plan. We continue to develop our staff and grow skills and capacity. In particular, we are training people in the use of the latest technologies, including the BOMI application, as Ms Leonard outlined, and the Microsoft product set. Departmental staff are involved in all aspects of the development of these new systems. The information system division has a dedicated training unit within the Department. In addition to holding in-house seminars and technical briefings, we arranged some 25 separate technology briefings and training courses last year. The division has implemented a management development programme and all 27 senior IT managers are involved in the training at present.

As the slide indicates, we use a mix of internal and external resources to deliver the best value for money. We spent some €10 million on external IT supports in each of the past two years. This information is available on our website.

All our external support is provided within Department-led teams. The Department participates in the initiatives of the National Procurement Service, which include frameworks for the purchasing of ICT equipment. All our projects are prioritised and monitored by the project office and the Department, the project governance committee, led by the Secretary General, the assistant secretary sponsor of the programme, the relevant project board and the project manager. This is all done to ensure best practice is achieved and that value for money is attained.

Our internal design and project management capacity is key to ensuring the architected solutions we talked about. We have a record of successful delivery of IT projects.

Mr. Niall Barry

Let me change the topic to inter-system communication. There has been much adverse comment to the effect that our ICT systems cannot talk to each other or to other systems. Nothing could be further from the truth. Let me give a very specific example. It has been said that our system and that of the Revenue Commissioners do not talk to each other. The basis of the national insurance system, which has been operating for the past 30 years, is predicated absolutely on our system and that of the Revenue Commissioners being able to talk to each other and exchange information in both directions. The system would simply not work unless it could talk to that of the Revenue Commissioners.

There are approximately 14 data interchanges with FÁS, for example. We provide information to the HSE. One of the better examples of how our systems talk to each other and to other Government agencies' systems concerns the General Register Office. When somebody dies, the information on the death is sent to our Department. We check the deceased person's identity on one of our systems and pass the information on to our pension system. We cease the pension payment and set up another pension payment if there is a survivor. We pay a bereavement grant, if required. All this is done automatically. We pass the same information out through our colleagues in CMOD to a number of different agencies for them to take action based on the information. This is a reasonably good example of how the systems talk to one another and to external systems.

Excepting the CMOD publishing service I have mentioned, I did a quick count of all the bodies with which we exchange electronic information and ascertained there were 89. With regard to our being able to talk to other systems technically, we have a fair amount of evidence suggesting that we can do so.

The key to successful communication is having a clear understanding of the processes involved, the information needed to support those processes and, perhaps, the legal permission to undertake those processes. In most cases, the criticism that our systems do not talk to one another, internally or externally, is simply reflecting the fact that that understanding is not present. It is not a technical issue.

Let me address the topic of the national database. We have much practical experience in this area as we operate a national database for client identity. The scale of the service we provide and the types of costs involved are shown in figures I have submitted to the committee. In 2011, we handled requests for identity matching for some 600,000 clients. Our systems dealt automatically with approximately two thirds of these but we had to examine the remainder manually, for all sorts of reasons. The reasons include minor discrepancies in the information a person can resolve, bearing in mind the programming difficulty. Other agencies reaped the benefit of our data and expertise in that regard.

Probably the most visible aspect of identity service is the provision of the new public service card. We have issued only approximately 6,000 of these to date but, thanks to our colleagues in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform, we have been given the go-ahead to invest in more resources to ramp up significantly the expansion.

To return to the national database issue, we have been successful because we focused on a clear, legally defined subset of data. They are associated purely with identity, and various business processes do not really have an effect. Although the provision of a single national database would be intuitively appealing, our trying to do so would require what I mentioned on the last slide, namely, a clear and shared understanding of all the processes and information required to support them for all the agencies for now and the future. As Sir Humphrey might say, it would be an extremely courageous decision to attempt to build such a beast. Apart from anything else, the privacy implications would be quite staggering.

The current public service reform plan is such that we are developing a more federated model whereby various agencies take the lead and share their expertise, as required, with other Departments. Much of this is made possible by what is known as a single customer view. This is a service provided by CMOD in the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to public service bodies. This allows us to check that we have the right details when we are dealing with somebody. We find it very useful in the Department. Other bodies are starting to find it useful also.

I hope that, between us, we have given the members some appreciation of the way in which ICT effectively supports the current mission of the Department and of how we are developing it to support our new responsibilities. I thank the members for listening and I hope my comments have been useful.

Chairman

I thank Mr. Barry. The meeting certainly has been useful. The figures were unreal and were very interesting. Mr. Barry is correct that there is much misinformation on what the system can and cannot do. The Department may receive unfair criticism and that is why its representatives are present today. They are here to talk us through the system once and for all in order to clarify the matter. This discussion has been very useful.

Deputy Aengus Ó Snodaigh

I thank the delegates for the presentation. What has been achieved to date and that which the delegates have been preparing are quite impressive. My questions are to determine whether the Department has the capacity to deal with the problems the delegates predict.

We received a presentation on the classification of the social welfare schemes. It was a quite detailed document and it lists various ICT systems, including the BOMI and ISTS systems. The names are probably meaningless to most people. Is it intended that there will be just one system at some stage and that some systems will be phased out? The diagram suggests there is currently storage capacity of 200 TB. Given the FÁS integration, the Pathways to Work initiative, etc., how much additional capacity will be required over the coming years?

I presume that a lot of documentation is still only available in hard copy. When somebody presents at a local office with documentation, is it the practice to scan it so it can be stored digitally rather than physically, such that it will be capable of being transferred to another location without its having to be printed? If there is a social welfare appeal, for example, the physical file has to be printed out and transferred from the Department to the welfare appeals office. It might be easier and quicker if it could be transferred electronically.

The officials have shown the system is capable of automatic processing when a death is registered. Can this be used to give advance notice to recipients of domiciliary care, for example, of a review so they can have the necessary documentation at hand and prevent any delay in a renewal of their payment? Such an advance notice system would also prevent recipients faced with a delay to their claim having to go to the community welfare officer for bridging funds.

When people get casual work, they often may get a day or week extra. Is there a facility whereby they can text or e-mail their welfare office rather than having to physically attend it to inform it of this extension? If one is working, one might not have the time to attend the office.

I thank the officials for their presentation. The amount of processing the Department does is spectacular. The officials mentioned a reduction in the number of cheques issued. Is there a move to have all transactions done electronically so that benefits are transferred to a recipient's post office or bank account, as nearly everyone now has such an account?

Mr. Niall Barry

The presentation paper, which I apologise for circulating late, was to give some impression of the volume of transactions on the various systems we have. The basic strategy is to replace all systems by the business object model implementation. That provides a fairly modern platform for many of the things we do. The ISTS systems, integrated short-term schemes, is the main engine of the local offices – the one area where it is perceived we need to improve – and is a highly capable system in terms of the volume of work it carries out. It needs to be absolutely robust and cast-iron. One meddles with it at one's peril.

We have been front-ending it with additional facilities. Regarding documents and hard copies, some of the scanning facilities would be built on the new business object model implementation and the results of that might be fed into the payments system of the older ISTS systems.

We have several initiatives poised to go out to local offices. Putting them into local offices depends on the processes we are doing under the NEES programme, national employment entitlement scheme. Having said that, we have rolled out many facilities to local offices under the general modernisation heading.

Storage has mushroomed and we are dealing with 200 terabytes. That is not huge in the modern scheme of things. I saw somewhere that the movie "Cowboys and Aliens" took up 100 terabytes when it was being made. The addition of FÁS and other agencies to our systems in so far as they are dealing with client, or what we term structured information, will mean a relatively small amount of extra storage. What really adds to storage is unstructured information such as documents, videos, sound clips and interviews. Storage will continue to expand and we will move from terabytes to petabytes and beyond.

The Deputy referred to moving away from documents in hard copy. We have an initiative in several pilot offices where we are trying to break the link between paper and service. That is why we have introduced electronic signing. This is live in four offices and we have an implementation plan to roll it out to at least another 32 offices during the year. It will be a slow process to break that link. One tampers with that system at one's peril but we have many plans in that area.

Ms Teresa Leonard

Informing recipients of reviews in advance is one area we are getting good at as an organisation. Earlier, I referred to the claim initiation for our pension customers. As people approach a particular age or life event that we are aware of as an organisation, we tend to let them know in advance. If possible, we make that adjustment to their benefit entitlements automatically.

For instance, between invalidity pension and contributory pension, we automatically transfer those customers as they approach 66 years of age without any input from themselves. The same applies to contributory pension to widow's pension after the death of a spouse. In the case of illness benefit to invalidity pension, we notify those customers well in advance that their illness benefit will run out in two years.

We are working to automate notification processes in most of our schemes. We do have manual administrative processes in place for other schemes to ensure no one falls between our payment systems. When one contingency ends, it must be ensured the recipient is moved on to the next contingency in a streamlined manner without recourse to community welfare services.

Mr. Niall Barry

What we have been doing at the local offices is not visible at the front. To remove some of the administrative backlog, we have issued something like 620,000 communications to people when their benefits expired to give them the chance to claim jobseeker's assistance. That has been automated whereas before it used to be manual.

The Deputy referred to online notification of casual work. We have some facilities for this but we still have several issues to work through with them.

The Department aims to reduce all cheques, to get rid of any manual form of payment and move over to doing everything electronically. There is a cohort of our clients for whom that poses particular difficulties. We have a payment strategy which will be published and acted on this year.

Chairman

How much does the issuing of cheques cost?

Mr. Niall Barry

I do not have the individual costs.

Chairman

It would be a great saving to the Department if the issuing of cheques could be eliminated.

Mr. Niall Barry

We would be more than happy to eliminate them.

Senator Feargal Quinn

What fascinating terms were used by the officials. I was delighted to hear them use the word "customer". When I was chairman of An Post 30 years ago, one of my great difficulties was to get people in the organisation to use the term "customers" rather than the "public" or whatever word they used before.

How far away are we from being a paperless society? Is that something one can envisage in the future? Is it possible to be not just cashless but paperless? Could the Department point to any country as being the leader in that regard or from where we can learn?

My next question relates to what could go wrong. What worries the Department and makes those coming to work on a Monday morning say "Oh my God, I hope this does not happen"? I had not realised how much was at stake in the work of the Department. That is my concern. When I was in business we worried about certain things and one of them was a breakdown in our IT system.

Mr. Niall Barry

We standardised the system based on using the word "client" simply to reflect the fact that unlike some customers, some people do not have an option but to deal with us. I wish to make that slight distinction. We do have a strong focus on the individual, or at least I hope we do.

On how far away we are from being paperless, people in the IT industry have been promising the paperless office for as long as I can remember. I do not consider us as being that much closer to achieving it. What we are seeing among consumers is people using tablets and Smartphones in a way they have not used them before. Our customers-clients are getting used to not having paper and that is the real trigger.

What we have been doing internally, which we did not mention in the presentation, is that we have been doing a lot of work in terms of bringing our information together in a digital way and making it available wherever it is needed in the Department. That facilitates having discussion boards and other such issues. We are gradually weeding out paper, but as Senator Quinn can see from our presentation this morning we are still some way from that. We are closer but it would be a brave person who would say that it will be grand in ten years time.

We have made significant improvements in the pensions area, as Ms Leonard has mentioned, in terms of people not having to put stuff together. When we set up the child benefit system we minimise the amount of work people have to do in terms of exchanging with us on paper. We send them information, for example, rather than getting them to fill out complete forms. They are all little things but the combination of them will bring us closer to a more efficient way of working for everybody. Efficiencies for us reflect in better customer service as well.

Senator Quinn asked what people are doing in other countries. We spend a lot of time looking at what people are doing in other countries. There is an international social security association, for example, which keeps track of what is generally happening but we also keep track in particular of our neighbours in the UK and generally in Europe. It is also easier to deal with some of the other English speaking administrations around the world. By and large we stand up well in comparison with them. We also spend a lot of time subscribing to international research, in particular in the IT area, because one needs to keep oneself up to date continuously.

I am not aware of any major initiatives in other countries that are significantly beyond what we are doing. That is not to say that something would not pop up if I were to look tomorrow, but we do keep an eye on those issues.

Senator Quinn also asked what kept me awake at night - apart from public appearances and such matters. In terms of the IT systems we have a lot of capacity behind it. He will recall that I indicated that we have two data centres, for example. The reason for having two is quite simply that if one goes down the other is still there. We lost one of those data centres in floods last year. I admit that the service slowed a little but nobody saw the consequences of that. Internally, people were able to resume work within half an hour. The data centre itself was out of action for more than a week. There is a degree of resilience in the system. A lot of professionalism is brought to bear by the people working on the Integrated Short-term Schemes, ISTS, services side in terms of the infrastructure to support that.

The biggest problems that can go wrong are human problems. Possibly one of the main things I worry about is attacks from outside. In recent weeks the newspapers carried stories about concerted attacks on the Government network because of the Internet regulations that were being considered. That resulted in quite a few sleepless nights for some people while they fended off such attacks. When I last looked we had approximately 17 different firewalls in place to try to prevent the wrong sort of traffic getting through to our systems. It would be a brave and courageous man who would say that he has security licked. That is probably the biggest single issue that arises.

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

On the paperless office, we have a significant programme under way in the Department to remove paper and to make better use of electronic interfaces. We mentioned earlier our BOMI system. All of the paper that comes in from customers is scanned. For instance, in our pension area in Sligo, 100% of paper is scanned, so the staff dealing with those claims see the information on-screen so it is all end-to-end processing on that.

At the same time we are also trying to scan in the archive of paper. Last year we scanned more than 400,000 registration documents for PPSNs. Internally we are geographically spread so the systems we have put in place for the intranet and our contents management system requires everyone to store their documents on shared team sites and a shared content management system to avoid having to pass paper around the office. We have built a lot of administrative applications to support that. We now have a PQ application for parliamentary questions. We processed more than 3,000 written parliamentary questions between September and December last year on the system which was all paperless. We have all our business planning and risk management on those applications. All our projects are managed on this centralised electronic system. Much internal administration is all paperless as well.

Ms Teresa Leonard

On the administration of schemes, we have what we refer to as case management within our systems and we also have task management which allows us to send work across the organisation. The location of the officer and the place does not affect us because we send information electronically rather than sending paper. We can send work which will give us further benefits in the future as regards staff allocations.

Chairman

It will also help with case loads.

Ms Teresa Leonard

Yes.

Senator John Kelly

I have a number of questions and points to make to the witnesses. On value for money, has the Department done a deal with mobile telephone providers for the use of mobile telephones for staff in the social welfare system?

Reference was made to client focus; however the telephone answering service is a disaster from the point of view of someone who rings the Department. People, unfortunately, receive an answer saying that the call will be dealt with shortly so they hang on. Most people now phone from mobile telephones and they hang on and use up perhaps €20 worth of credit before the call gets cut off. I suggest there should be more telephone lines and that calls should only be answered if someone is free to take the call. That way it will not cost the clients, on whom we are so focused, unduly.

What level of co-operation do we have with the United Kingdom, in that if someone comes from there to here to claim social welfare, how soon can we get information from the United Kingdom on whether the person is also claiming there? From my experience co-operation is poor and in most cases if a social welfare official rings up the UK authority with a social service number the information will not be given over the telephone. One must put a query in writing and perhaps one will get a response after six months.

What are we doing about the outrageous time delays in dealing with all kinds of appeals, in particular for carer's allowance, which can take up to nine months or longer?

I support the use of post offices for the delivery of social welfare payments. It has benefits from a fraud control perspective in that local post offices know their clientele. We should have greater use of post offices. I was always a critic of the use of the banking system because once one starts to pay money into a bank account, a person could be in Timbuktu, which has been well proven. We should examine the system in detail.

As regards going paperless, it was in 1997 or even earlier when the integrated short-term schemes, ISTS, system was put in place. Staff were promised that, if they took it on board, there would be less paper, but there turned out to be twice as much paper.

The community welfare system makes exceptional needs payments to clients. In many cases, paying the service's provider would be more appropriate. There seems to be a reluctance-----

Chairman

The Senator is straying off topic.

Senator John Kelly

I know, but the witnesses may have an opinion on this matter.

Chairman

As they cannot answer some of the questions, they can pick and choose.

Mr. Niall Barry

The Senator asked whether we had a deal with mobile telephone providers. We are investigating that idea and discussions are ongoing. We are seeking ways to reduce our communications costs and we believe there are opportunities to do so. Given the state of the negotiations, though, and if the committee does not mind, I will provide no further details. We are conscious of the need to save money on communications.

Will Mr. O'Connor answer the question on telephone answering?

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

Some 6.5 million telephone calls is a lot. We have telephone banks, which are supported by contact management software, in our headquarters. The rest of the calls are administrative in nature, calls to local offices, etc. The telephone banks took 2.7 million calls last year. The peaks are the difficulty. On one day last July, we received 10,000 calls to a small information telephone bank in Sligo. On another day, we received 30,000 calls to our child benefit line. Dealing with call volumes is always a challenge. However, we have put a great deal of effort into manning calls.

We try to provide as many ways as possible of getting information to people, including via walk-in and online services. For example, people can submit inquiries about their claims through our secure online services. We work with the Citizens Information Board and so on to provide as much access as possible. We also rely on information providers and public representatives. It is an acknowledged challenge.

I examined the abandonment rate. It is generally less than 10%. Due to the large number of peaks during the year, however, the rate was at the higher end of the teens.

Regarding mobile telephones, we use lo-call telephone services to reduce the cost to customers. They can also telephone their local offices. We are examining our strategy in terms of whether we can utilise other services that are cheaper for customers. The Department of Public Expenditure and Reform has made a great deal of progress in this regard. The Citizens Information Board has moved to 046 numbers, which are cheaper for customers.

Chairman

Is the Department of Social Protection considering an extension in the number of hours during which people can telephone?

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

We try to provide as much time as possible, but we only have certain resources. If the hours are longer, the telephone service resources must be doubled. The decision is whether to have people processing claims, enforcing controls, answering telephones, etc. We have the balance right. There are many walk-in services and other ways for customers to access information. There were 6.5 million telephone calls, 4 million people used our websites, online services were used significantly and a large number of text messages were used.

Mr. Niall Barry

I will revert on more of the Senator's questions, but Ms Leonard can answer his question on co-operation with the UK.

Ms Teresa Leonard

Before I joined Mr. Barry's team, I used to manage pensions administration. It is partially from this perspective that I will answer the question. When I took over the administration of pensions, we had many claims on hand with our UK colleagues. We put in place a clean relationship with them and processes to exchange claims data on an ongoing basis. We set up a close liaison with the team that administered pension data and built good relations. Through this work, we cleared all outstanding UK claims. This was a major achievement. We put in place an ability to ring and get information from both sides to known people.

The Senator pointed out that people will not answer or give information out via telephone. This is a data protection issue and, given our exposure, we must be careful. In several areas, we have named people who can be contacted directly to facilitate a quick turnaround on customers' claims.

I cannot answer the specific question on the unemployment services provided by local offices, as I am not familiar with the issue. We can revert to the Senator.

Mr. Niall Barry

I will turn to a few of the Senator's other points. I cannot give the committee any deep insight into the appeals office, which is separate from the Department. My colleague on the management board who is responsible for the office spends a great deal of time and effort dealing with its issues.

The Senator stated that post offices were the way to go. We have been preparing and are about to publish a payment strategy document. As the Senator is probably aware, our engagement with the post office will unfortunately become subject to public procurement in the relatively near future. While we value that engagement, it is not necessarily a decision we can make ourselves. I take the point that post offices tend to know the clients better than practically anyone else.

In terms of ISTS, the Senator mentioned our previous promise about less paper. There was a reduction in paper, but it was not on the client side as desired. The Senator might recall my response to Deputy Ó Snodaigh when I stated that we had started to put some of our business object model system in front of ISTS and that we had separated some of the physical signing from the documents, in that we had started scanning. We are moving further in that direction than we have been previously. As I told Senator Quinn, however, there will be no paperless office in my lifetime. We will keep working at it.

I cannot discuss in detail the Senator's final point on making exceptional needs payments to providers rather than to clients. Elements of the public service reform Act deal with the concept of money following the client as well as with the different ways to provide support. We will consider the matter. I mentioned the Department's evolving mission. What the HSE and we are doing has not been streamlined, but we have taken the first important step in bringing people together. We now need to bring the systems together, following which we need to improve them. There is a way to go yet, but we are conscious of what can and should be done. I do not have material for the committee, but if the Senator has specific questions, I can look into them.

Senator John Kelly

Sometimes, the exceptional needs payments do not reach providers as intended. Some superintendents are reluctant to pay rent allowance to landlords because they believe that doing so forms a contract, yet there must be a way to do so without a contract being formed.

Mr. Barry referred to getting value for money from telephone service providers. When I was a member of a county council, I was paying high mobile telephone bills. We sought value for money and did a deal with a provider for unlimited calls and texts for €15 per month. The Department could do something similar and save a considerable amount of money.

Regarding the telephone answering service-----

Chairman

The Senator has made three points.

Senator John Kelly

I sympathise with anyone who tries to get through to the Department. I take Mr. O'Connor's point about the volume of calls, which must be horrendous. At the same time, however, one must sympathise with the lone parent who uses up her last €20 of credit while waiting to speak to somebody. Perhaps a lo-call service should be put in place for such people.

Deputy Nicky McFadden

I apologise for being late. I have had a great experience with my local office. The manager is superb and the rest of his team is amazing.

When is the personal identity card being rolled out? It will be very helpful in preventing fraud. In regard to Deputy Ó Snodaigh's request for flexibility on texting and e-mailing where a client is employed for two weeks, how long does it take to recommence payments once the employment is finished?

Mr. Niall Barry

I presume the Deputy is referring to the roll-out of the public services card. We have initiated the process and we will be rolling it out in conjunction with the delivery of functions to the new NEES offices. We have just received approval from the Department of Public Expenditure and Reform to allocate resources to this area. We will need to recruit these resources before setting up the registration sessions because a public service card is not worth the polycarbonite on which it is printed without a strong registration system. The Department has made several public commitments to accelerate that programme but I cannot provide a definitive timeframe for completion. My personal view is that it will take approximately two years to cover the entire cohort of people of working age. We will, however, explore the possibilities afforded by the new resources we have been allocated to determine whether we can supplement them by taking more innovative initiatives. We are working as hard as we can on the matter.

If I understand the Deputy's question on text and e-mail correctly-----

Deputy Nicky McFadden

The Minister stated yesterday that people should be able to do that.

Chairman

People who signed off for a week sometimes had to wait three months for their next payment. We are advised that is no longer the case in most offices.

Mr. Niall Barry

We have a lot of information in respect of what jobseekers can do. All offices have been notified about a procedure whereby people can come off the live register and suspend their claims for a period of up to four weeks and notices have been posted advising claimants to consult an official if they have been offered temporary work. Approximately 2,500 people are availing of that facility. A range of other supports are available for people who take up temporary employment, as well as for their employers. If Deputies wish to raise specific issues we would be more than happy to respond to them. The procedure does not appear to be widely understood, however.

Deputy Nicky McFadden

Will people be paid in the week after they sign on?

Mr. Niall Barry

That is my understanding.

Chairman

The issue does not appear to arise in every office. We have asked the Minister to investigate it further because we have received reports that the procedure is not as straightforward as it should be. I understand the purpose of the poster campaign is to change this perception.

Mr. Niall Barry

I spoke recently to one of my colleagues who has been investigating the matter. She assured me that the posters are up and the procedure is being followed in the offices.

Deputy Seán Kyne

The ISTS were initiated more than 20 years ago. Phase one of the schemes came to the local offices in March 1995. Given that Mr. Barry indicated some of the social welfare systems continue to rely on the old key system, the initial impression might not be great. Is he confident that the ISTS are able to deal with the approvals for schemes or would a new system improve processes? I acknowledge the high rate of payments being made on time but most of the problems raised with Deputies relate to delays in approvals and appeals. Can anything be improved in the ISTS to speed up approvals?

In regard to fraud, is Mr. Barry confident that the information technology systems are adequate? What else could be introduced to ensure better communication between systems to prevent fraud?

How many schemes are accessible online and are plans in place to further roll out online facilities? I concur with Senator Kelly regarding the frustration people feel in trying to contact the Department.

Mr. Niall Barry

The Deputy noted that the ISTS have been in place for 20 years. The Comptroller and Auditor General pointed out in 2008 that we had already more than recouped our investment on them. The system is based on the technology of a time when mouse and graphic interface use was not prevalent but everybody has a mouse and a PC at this stage. There are currently more personal computers than people in the Department, for good reasons. This points to the need to modernise the system, which is what we have been doing.

Award time is a function of workload as much as anything else. While we have achieved significant productivity improvements from implementing the business objective model, it is not magic. I will ask my colleagues to speak further on the time taken to award but the system will certainly improve productivity by cutting down on paperwork, albeit not as much as Senator Kelly might prefer. We are dealing with a heavier workload with no increase in local office area resources.

Ms Teresa Leonard

The BOMI programme brings significant administrative benefits to the organisation. However, those benefits will not be realised unless we look at the organisation's processes and staff structures. Mr. Barry correctly noted it is not a magic bullet but it can achieve its ends in conjunction with streamlining our processes. Everywhere we have implemented BOMI systems we have also set up a reorganisation project. We have done business process re-engineering to ensure we are streamlining systems to the most efficient and effective level possible because that is how we will get the benefits. We use the system to support us while redesigning our processes. Approval improves as a consequence of system and process improvement. It will not improve through one or the other.

Mr. Niall Barry

I have lost one of the questions so if I have not covered it, please remind me.

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

A question was asked about online applications. As Ms Leonard stated, the important point is that when one makes an online claim, it must integrate with the system that does the processing. This reflects the work we have built up on the business object model implementation, BOMI, application. Online claiming is available for child benefit, some jobseeker payments, the State pension, household benefits, widow's schemes and redundancy and insolvency payments. Other services such as jobseeker sign-off services are online as well.

I referred to local office sites. If someone goes to their local office site, there is a Google Maps facility and some online services for signing off.

We received more than 10,000 online fraud reports last year. Other online services such as requesting application forms or statements of benefits or insurance are available as well. This is what we have at the moment but we are building the online element around the new BOMI system as well. The facilities are there and we intend to add more as we go on.

Mr. Niall Barry

One thing we must be careful about with regard to online applications is the identity of people with whom we are dealing. It is not the same as the case of Revenue where, by and large, people are contributing to the national coffers. We are paying out a great deal of money and we must be very sure we know what we are dealing with. This reduces the amount we can do online. We have instituted measures such as transaction identity numbers that we send to people by text message once we are sure of their identity. They can use these as a way of getting at confidential information relevant to them but it also gives us the equivalent of an electronic signature. We are considering more of this as we go along but we must be very careful in this area. This is one of the reasons behind the registration of the public service card and related issues.

I did not mention one particular area in my presentation which the committee might be interested in. We are doing some work at present around the notion of predictive analytics. This involves examining our workload or database and trying to take a more risk-based view of our customer load. We expect this will show results and this is something we will do a good deal more of in future. I am unsure whether I answered all the questions.

Deputy Seán Kyne

The delegation has suggested it will roll out more online application services. What sort of timescales and plans are in place? Reference was made to identity cards. Is this similar to PAYE online systems whereby a PIN is issues and one can access it?

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

I referred to some of the online services available on the jobseeker side for casual signing and for claiming jobseeker's benefits. We must identify the customer involved. This facility is available in certain local offices. It is about putting the processes in place. We will include online facilities as we go through each of the local offices putting the processes in place. This will take place in the next year or so and we will get all the local offices done.

Deputy Áine Collins

I thank the delegation for the presentation. I offer my apologies for having to leave earlier. I was on quorum duty in the Chamber. Questions have been asked already on most of the areas in which I took an interest. One of the issues that arose in my constituency was information being requested more than once when people found themselves unemployed. In one case, the person in question was asked for the same information four times. I have heard that there was more of that in the area.

I was pleased to hear about the online application system because I believe it will be of great benefit. I appreciate the risks around it but I am sure with some risk-based analysis it will be beneficial. The area of fraud is somewhat separate. Contrary to what we hear on the street, most people who apply for benefit are entitled to it or deserve it or they are out of work or whatever. To this end, can the area of fingerprint identity be examined or are there data protection issues around it? We all hear about the issue of people living outside the country, coming in once each month to sign on and then leaving and spending the money elsewhere. From what I hear, this is driving people on the street insane. Is there some way we can consider whether, in the case of people who collect money once a week, there could be a fingerprint facility in a local post office and this could be linked in to an online application? Is that possible or are we one million miles from it?

I wish to raise the black market issue. Someone came to my constituency office only last week to report that they had seen four people on a building site whom they knew were claiming. They made a telephone call about it and they were asked for their name, address and PPS number, so they hung up. That was one particular case. If we are trying to combat fraud, that must be examined. I made a telephone call one day to establish the number of people unemployed in a particular area, their profile and the nature of their job skills. I was unable to get that information. I presume with the Pathways to Work programme, this is being worked on but I am keen hear a comment on it.

Mr. Niall Barry

We spoke briefly on some of these issues. I asked my colleagues in Deputy Collins's area to examine the general case to which she referred. They came back with no specific information for the Deputy. However, they are rather keen to get hold of the specific information and follow it through with Deputy Collins.

Deputy Collins raised the issue of identity and fingerprints. The public service card process involves taking a photograph to International Civil Aviation Organization standards which is biometric in terms of being a measurable feature of a person. This involves a registration process. The photograph we take is checked to ensure it is of a particular quality. Also, we have invested in software which, behind the scenes, checks one photograph against another so that we are putting ourselves in a position, as we roll out the card, to check many of the fraud issues. To add fingerprints to the mix at the moment, while we are trying to carry out work with the national employment and entitlements service, would be an extra burden on the local offices and, to be honest, they are completely stretched at the moment. Technically, it is possible. The card could even hold a fingerprint, if that is what we wished to do. However, it would involve a considerable amount of work to put the systems in place and to check them. I would prefer to go with our current programme. If that does not deliver the goods, we could add such a feature to it.

Deputy Collins referred to people leaving the country. There is a somewhat different issue around people leaving the country, that is, our ability to track the arrivals to and departures from the country. That is independent of biometric issues and so on. We are examining that area at the moment and some legislative changes are being proposed which would give us additional powers to examine this area.

Deputy Collins referred to getting a profile on a particular area in terms of the skills set. That is the sort of thing we are doing as part of the profiling work under way at the moment. However, it is in its early days. While the systems are in place to hold this information and while it is being done in several offices, we do not have the detail necessary to answer such a question. We are definitely getting there and we are spreading out the profiling work. At present it is in four local offices and it is being rolled out to four more as we speak. It will go nationwide as soon as we can get it out. I understand there is a target in the Pathways to Work programme relating to this area. From memory, which may be faulty, I understand 95% of offices this year will have profiling information. That will put us in the position to be able to begin to collect it. Whether that will give a complete profile of a particular client base in a particular area is unclear. It might take some time to get that data. However, the systems are in place to do it.

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

The online service for fraud reporting allows a person to report anonymously or to include one's details. There is a choice. I would have expected telephone calls would have been the same but I am unsure if it is the same throughout.

Ms Teresa Leonard

We accept telephone calls anonymously. It is part of an accepted process in our organisation. It is possible that those involved asked for the details but we accept anonymous information.

Deputy Áine Collins

I appreciate that but is it reasonable to expect someone to know a PPS number?

Ms Teresa Leonard

No. That is not expected.

Deputy Áine Collins

That is what the person was asked.

Chairman

Mr. O'Connor referred to telephone calls. Some years ago I called for all telephone calls to be recorded or, at least, for the option to be available. I realise now why that did not occur or why it could not take place. In the case of most services where one rings up now, one is informed that the call may be recorded for training purposes. Is that taking place in the Department of Social Protection or do we expect it will take place? There can often be difficulties on both sides. It would be useful if everyone knew this and if it was possible to keep a record for both customer and service provider. This is an issue we could look at, or perhaps it has been looked at.

With regard to the sharing of information, much has been said about sharing between the different agencies. How far does sharing go? Currently, people come to social welfare services and provide information for a means test and fill in all the applications and forms in order to apply for a payment. A week later the same people will be in another office and must give all the same information in order to get a medical card or some other service. Can this information be shared or how far away are we from a situation where this can happen?

Mr. Niall Barry

Perhaps Mr. O'Connor would like to take the question on the recording of phone calls and then I will deal with the other issue.

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

With regard to calls, the technology we have allows us to record phone calls. It is difficult to record 6.5 million phone calls so a choice must be made as to which phone calls will be recorded and which staff will deal with those calls and the control we will have over that. This is something we are examining. We are conscious that other agencies record calls and it is part of our thinking to develop this. There are a few issues to consider, but the technology certainly supports it.

Chairman

I presume other organisations with the system have this worked out.

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

Yes.

Chairman

I presume they have worked out who to select and how to do it. I presume it is system-based and not personal and that the Department could copy that if necessary.

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

Yes. One choice is to record everything and then trawl through it as required and many organisations do that for training purposes. Another option is to record a call as the call is in progress and another is the option to delete a meaningless call. There are certainly options and the technology supports recording.

Chairman

Is it being looked at?

Mr. Darragh O’Connor

It is being looked at as part of our general telephony strategy, but there are a number of issues we must work through.

Chairman

Thank you.

Mr. Niall Barry

From a technical perspective, voice is a data type in its own right and it is something we should collect and process. However, I am not sure the technology is up to the optimum level for full processing of voice data in the way we would like. We have done a fair bit of work on voice recognition and voice biometrics and the like and while this is an interesting area, it is quite problematic. Therefore, I do not see it being introduced on a large scale just yet.

The Chairman asked about the sharing of information and mentioned means tests. Committee members will have seen mention of means on Ms Leonard's diagram. This concerned delivery of the system that can record means. What we have been doing with this system is plugging it into our internal systems and starting to populate the data. I made this same point to Deputy Collins earlier. The system is there and it can be done. However, we do not have all the data we would like yet. That said, we are currently carrying out a technical pilot with some external bodies for exchanging means information with them and those pilots are due to finish in the next few weeks. We want to ensure we have the technical capability to exchange means and I have no doubt but that the pilots will conclude successfully. Delivery will have to wait until we populate all the data behind it.

Chairman

Are we heading in that direction?

Mr. Niall Barry

Absolutely. We are heading in that direction.

Chairman

As there are no further questions, we will finish. This has been very informative and interesting and I thank our witnesses.

The joint committee adjourned at 11.45 a.m. until 9.30 a.m. on Wednesday, 7 March 2012.