The North's controversial Child Support Agency (CSA) is to be shut down with the loss of up to 900 jobs, the Department for Social Development warned today.
Officials told an Assembly committee that the minister had decided to abolish the misfiring unit after years of technical difficulties in a break with the past.
Although the number of job losses has not been finalised, Social Development Committee chairman Gregory Campbell asked DSD Deputy Secretary Barney McGahan whether up to 900 positions could be lost.
The civil servant accepted the figure as a possibility, out of the present total of around 1,700 staff.
"The minister has concluded that the Child Support Agency should be disbanded and its responsibilities subsumed with the Department for Social Development," he said.
The CSA has been plagued with problems since it was created in the 1990s. A new computer system in 2003 was designed to solve the problem but many cases have not been transferred from the old regime because of continuing concerns.
Sinn Féin MLA Mickey Brady welcomed the winding up of the CSA. "People's perception was that it was an agency that was there to claw back money and didn't have any social conscience." He said its record was atrocious.