Sinn Féin has urged any civil servant or minister who has been overpaid to return the cash to the exchequer.
Yesterday, Public Expenditure Minister Jack Chambers announced that some 13,000 civil servants would have their pension deductions checked for errors.
The Dublin West TD indicated that some are thought to owe money to the State, while a minority will be given money.
The pension audit will include a number of serving Cabinet Ministers and Ministers of State.
On The Pat Kenny Show, Sinn Féin Finance spokesperson Pearse Doherty described the revelation as “shocking, to tell you the truth”.
“To have an error in a Department or agency is normal, we try to avoid them,” he said.
“But this isn’t just one error, it’s not just one miscalculation - this is across three different categories and three different errors.
“All affecting possibly thousands of individuals [and] large sums of money.”
The Department of Finance building in Dublin. Picture by: Kevin Foy / Alamy Stock PhotoOne senior civil servant is thought to owe taxpayers as much as €280,000 due to incorrect payments.
“How can someone be overpaid €280,000 and nobody notice?” Deputy Doherty continued.
“That seems to be what has happened with a senior civil servant in relation to his or her pension.
“A pension pot that was in excess of €2 million and they miscalculated the payment to that person by €280,000.”
Deputy Doherty lamented that there is still “not a huge amount of detail” about the issue.
“People don’t know how their pension deductions are calculated - so, that’s understandable,” he said.
“But if you’re retired with a pension of €2 million and you are getting a bullet payment of €280,000 more than you were expecting, you’re also a very senior civil servant because you don’t have pensions of that scale unless you’re at the very top.
“Then that’s something that someone should have noticed.”
Deputy Doherty added that there is an “irony” that civil servants working at the Department of Finance have been impacted and urged anyone overpaid to return the money as soon as possible.
“In terms of the senior civil servants, anyone who got money they weren’t entitled to need to pay that money back,” he said.
Main image: Pearse Doherty. Picture by: Leah Farrell/RollingNews
