Close to €15m in ACRES payments will be clawed back from almost 8,700 farmers, the Department of Agriculture has confirmed.

The Department is seeking to recover around €1,700 from farmers on average.

The figures were provided to the farm organisations at a Farmers’ Charter meeting this week.

The meeting was also told that 1,620 farmers have withdrawn from the troubled environmental scheme. This figure is up from the 1,500 recorded earlier this summer.

Close to 45,000 farmers remain in tranche one of the scheme.

As of the end of September, around 41,000 of these farmers had received payments of €246m, or an average of €6,000 each.

A further 4,000 farmers are still to be paid, with clawbacks expected to be sought from around 40% of these applicants.

The massive level of ACRES repayments relates to the flat-rate interim payment of €5,000 per applicant which was made earlier this year.

The Department has calculated that close to 8,700 applicants have been significantly overpaid given their forecast income from ACRES.

The farm organisations have called on the Department to halt all efforts to recoup ACRES monies until the level of payments to farmers under the scheme has been agreed and settled.

Misgivings

Meanwhile, Michael Ryan, the president of Agricultural Consultants Association (ACA), has expressed serious misgivings regarding the accuracy of ACRES payments.

“Our confidence in the system is not great,” Ryan told the Irish Farmers Journal.

Advisers are unable to verify payments to clients because they don’t have access to the IT system which calculates the final payment to individual farmers, Ryan explained.

“We are also coming across scenarios where plots have been omitted from applications, this is particularly the case in CP [co-operation] areas,” he said.

The Department had not responded to queries regarding this matter as the Irish Farmers Journal went to press.