A wrongly addressed email was responsible for thousands of benefits recipients’ payments being delayed last week, Treasury Minister Alfred Cannan has confirmed.

As calls grew for a full investigation into how one mis-directed email could cause such a problem he pledged a review of the systems in place.

A total of 9,850 people were due benefits payments in their bank accounts first thing on Thursday, which did not arrive. Originally Treasury bosses said the payments would not arrive until Monday of this week, but in the end most were paid out by Friday.

In response to an emergency question in Tynwald on Tuesday, Mr Cannan said: ’May I once again apologise to the customers who were affected by the events of last Thursday.

’Clearly, we would never wish to delay payment of benefits and we will put measures in place so this specific incident does not happen again.’

An email prompt to authorise the Bacs payment process was sent to an ’incorrect email address’, Mr Cannan said.

The first staff new about it was when one of them was contacted by an affected member of the public.

Mr Cannan praised the staff, who handled hundreds of phone calls, and ’for their ingenuity in finding and implementing a solution such that 70% of payments had been made by 5pm on Thursday evening and 99.8% of payments had been made by just after midnight on Friday morning’.

He explained: ’During the afternoon of last Thursday we were able to use the eQ faster pay facility to make the payments which should have been made by the Bacs system.

’Furthermore, I can confirm that we made 13 emergency payments of £100 each to customers in the most urgent need on Thursday via post offices.’

Anyone who incurred bank charges as a result of the late payment, he said, should contact social security, who would arrange a payment of the charge.

Mr Cannan added: ’We will be examining all of our controls around benefit and state pension payments and will put in place measures to ensure that the events of last Thursday are not repeated.’

Lawrie Hooper (LibVannin, Ramsey) said: ’I am sure I am not the only one who is astonished to learn that the entire Isle of Man benefits system can be brought crashing down by a single point of failure. That speaks to me of a more fundamental issue within some of the control systems.’

Mr Cannan added: ’The Bacs system takes three working days to process and in this failure event we were able to reprocess the format of the transaction and have them paid by a faster pay facility.

’We are currently examining whether the data can be, in fact, reformatted on a permanent basis so that in the future we can simply transfer the data, were there to be a failure with the Bacs system, onto the faster pay system.’