Under the provisions of the governing EU Regulations, payments under the Single Farm Payment may be made only in respect of eligible land. Applicants under the Scheme are obliged annually to declare the land parcels available to them; said details of the eligible areas of the land parcels are then recorded onto LPIS (Land Parcel Identification System), my Department's computerised database of all land parcels declared, which currently contains details of in excess of one million individual land parcels. Applicants are obliged to identify and exclude all ineligible features, such as scrub, roadways, etc. Therefore, the LPIS database has to be amended on an ongoing basis to reflect any permanent changes, such as parcel boundary changes, addition of new parcels, etc. In the vast majority of cases, while the various ineligible areas had not been mapped out of LPIS, applicants were making sufficient deductions for the ineligible features and, therefore, there were no over-payments in these cases.
The case of the person named was subject to LPIS review and I can confirm that, while the person named was initially identified as having over-claimed on a specific land parcel, following consideration of his written appeal, I can confirm that it has been found that no such over-claim arose. Given this successful appeal, the necessary arrangements are now being made to make the necessary refund due to the person named.