The Forest Service, which is part of the Department of Agriculture, decided to raise an overclaim in relation to a forestry grant. However, the man complained to the Ombudsman about it.

The man sold some of the land on which the grant was paid 18 years after the original grant application. The land was sold to the ESB for the construction of power lines. When the Department recalculated the amount payable to the man under the grant, it used a new digitised method to measure the land.

“Using this new method, the Department calculated that the man had over claimed the amount of land eligible for the grant in his original application,” Ombudsman Peter Tyndall said in his recently published Casebook. “This gave rise to an overpayment which the Department recouped back to the date of the original claim and charged interest by way of netting (withholding payments due) until the debt was repaid in full.”

The Ombudsman established that the reduction in eligible land had not been calculated properly as the Department had not adjusted it to properly take account of the area of the plantation removed by the ESB.

The Department agreed to review its decision and revised it in line with the Ombudsman’s examination. The man was refunded the sum of €3,824.41 recouped by the Department.

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