A quarter of people convicted of social welfare fraud or of obstructing investigations by the Department of Social, Community and Family Affairs in 1998 were employers. Employers also accounted for over 40 per cent of the savings which accrued to the Exchequer as a result of fraud detection.
These are among statistics contained in a report compiled by the Department's Central Prosecutions Service for last year.
Social welfare fraud accounts for about 0.33 per cent of the £4.5 billion spent by the Department. Spot checks revealed that the highest level of non-compliance was among claimants for illness payments, at 20 per cent. But employers were not far behind as a category, with 17.5 per cent of the 6,003 employers checked found to be breaking the law.
Of the £74.58 million saved as a result of the investigations, £30.3 million was accounted for by employers. Some £12.54 million of the savings accrued from investigating employers was accounted for by abuse of the PAYE and PRSI systems. A further £9.5 million in arrears of PAYE and PRSI was identified.
Of the 160 people convicted for welfare fraud last year, 43 were employers. They accounted for 37 of the 96 people fined, four of the 27 given the Probation Act and one of the nine imprisoned. Of the 14 against whom cases were proved but no penalty was imposed, only one was an employer, and none of the 14 given community service was an employer.
Startling though the level of abuse of the system by employers is, the 1998 figures suggest that compliance is increasing. In 1994, only 76 per cent of the employers investigated were complying with the law, compared with over 82 per cent last year. There has also been a decline in the number of cases where employees seeking unemployment benefit had not been able to produce an up-to-date P60. Last year, the figure was 11,500, but in 1991 it was 48,700.