Benefit frauds roll on

In Ulster, a woman has been convicted of benefit fraud. She claimed Income Support totalling £3,658 while failing to declare she had capital.

A Rochdale woman who fraudulently obtained £35,000 by posing as a single mother was caught when officials secretly filmed her at home living with her husband (which is generally what we want mothers to do, by the way). She lodged a claim when her husband left her in 1997, but she carried on claiming income support, housing benefit and council tax benefit when he returned a year later.

A three-month undercover surveillance operation was mounted at their house after an anonymous tip-off. This doesn't suggest a council that's spotting all instances of fraud. And even if they did, obtaining the evidence to convict seems horrendously labour-intensive. Indeed, she initially denied the allegations when interviewed, but when shown the evidence she admitted her husband had returned.

Today's third case concerns a Bishops Stortford woman who was given a 12-month conditional discharge after she claimed almost £3,000 in housing and council benefit that she was not entitled to. She failed to tell East Herts Council when she started receiving Working Tax Credit.

The paper explains that

Benefits payments are worked out according to the claimant's circumstances, so if there any changes they need to tell the council within four weeks so their payments can be adjusted. This means anything that affects their household income, which includes other people living with them, needs to be declared.

Why don't the DWP and HMRC automatically share this information with local authorities? There is no human rights issue here - if people sign up for means tested benefits from taxpayers, taxpayers are entitled to expect that the state will routinely combine information from the relevant financial databases to ensure that no money is given away which is not properly due.

This would have picked up both these English cases quickly. And if people knew this would be done as a matter of routine, we would probably see fewer attempts at fraudulent claims, especially if the penalties were known to be realistic.