ICTs and Benefit Fraud Crackdown
The government are flagging claims that they’ve saved £0.5 billion via a crackdown on benefit fraud.
A central plank of their new strategy has been increased data sharing within government, though it seems that the Inland Revenue were initially reluctant to participate:
The dramatic turnaround follows a decision pushed through four years ago by the former social security minister, Angela Eagle, to persuade the Inland Revenue to share its data with benefit offices to track down fraudsters. The policy was initially resisted by the Inland Revenue but after what Ms Eagle calls a “Whitehall kerfuffle” the tax officers backed down.
Now officials are able to trace immediately whether a claimant is both paying tax and claiming benefit at the same time. This has led to 80,914 people caught in the last year. The number of cases of people working and claiming at the same time has nearly halved in the last five years.
The ministry is also targeting what it calls “at risk” groups of people, thought to be likely to be claiming benefit while holding down self-employed jobs. Altogether 133,277 cases have been identified.
Mr Pond is adamant that the department is not picking on particular ethnic groups as part of the exercise.
Officials are also having more success in cooperating with local councils to curb housing benefit and council tax fraud. Checks on claimants revealed that some 44,000 people had made incorrect claims which did not match their income.
We await news of an equally vigorous and technologically sophisticated ‘crackdown’ on non-take up of benefit entitlements…
