Dáil Éireann Debate, Wednesday - 19 December 2018
553. Deputy Bernard J. Durkan asked the Minister for Employment Affairs and Social Protection if all issues that arose in respect of the payment of illness benefit to recipients in recent months have now been resolved; and if she will make a statement on the matter. [53835/18]
Amharc ar fhreagraMy Department transferred administration of the Illness Benefit (IB) scheme to from a legacy IT platform to its newer core IT platform in August 2018. Although the system change has worked effectively for over 80% of IB customers, significant difficulties arose following implementation for a number of customers.
My Department took three main steps to resolve the issues impacting on payments. First, it deployed additional staff to process works and respond to the customer enquiries. Second, it developed some new IT "workarounds" that address the payment gap issues and to ensure a faster flow-through to payments. Third, it continued to review the design rules in the system to afford greater flexibility in processing of claims and certificates.
I believe we have made good progress in this regard, with payment levels returned to and maintained at the expected norm, (over 50,000 customers paid each week) for the past two months. Arrears payments have also been made to customers who were delayed payments. Telephone helpline and call handling performance has also been addressed and is now back to normal levels. Currently, people who are due a payment and whose certificates and claims are in order now receive their payment entitlement promptly. In stating this it is important to note that there are always cases, and were always such cases under the old system, where people's payments are legitimately stopped or paused for a variety of reasons. In addition there will always be cases where errors are made that impact payments to individual customers. While we endeavour to keep these to a minimum it is inevitable that some errors will be made in an Illness Benefit scheme that processes over 9,000 transactions per day.
In order to ensure that we learn from the lessons of the transition of the IB system onto a new platform, I have arranged for an independent review into how the changes to IB were planned, implemented and – importantly – communicated to customers. I expect this work to be completed early in 2019.
Finally, I would like to sincerely apologise again for the difficulties and burden experienced by customers earlier this year and believe the action taken to address these issues has worked and is continuing to work to ensure customers receive a good standard of service.
I trust this clarifies the matter for the Deputy.
