Dozens of workers at a large Co Donegal company exploited a benefits loophole to print off their own Covid certs and defraud more than €65,000 in illegal payments from the Irish Government.
Instead, all they had to do was to log onto a National Health Service website in the UK and print off a certificate of self-isolation. Normally, Illness Benefit is a scheme operated by the Department of Social Protection to support people who cannot work in the short term because they are sick or ill.
According to Department of Social Protection investigators, the company for which the employees worked knew nothing of the scam and cooperated fully with the investigation. The illegal claims ranged from as little as €291.67 to as much as €4,841.67 which overall amounted to overpayments of €65,113.48 during the pandemic.