Some lessons from benefit fraud cases

It's been estimated that the DWP lost £690m to benefit fraud in the last financial year. That's in addition to frauds on local authorities. Both feature in today's round-up.

A Batchley woman pleaded guilty to offences of dishonestly claiming income support, housing benefit and council tax benefit totalling £11,447.37 between August 2005 and July 2006 by failing to notify the DWP and Redditch Council that she had married.

A couple from County Durham ran a factory from their home, ripping off the music and film industries by illegally duplicating discs. At the same time James Cowan was claiming incapacity benefit and job seekers allowance while Ann Cowan was claiming incapacity benefit.

A Blackburn pensioner obtained an overpayment of £4,479 in council tax benefit by not declaring pensions and savings. How was this discovered? In 2005 a referral from the DWP suggested she might be entitled to an occupational pension and she was called in for an interview, at the end of which she signed a written statement to the effect that neither she or her husband had a private pension.

In March 2007 and further referral was received and inquiries revealed she had been receiving pensions from Lancashire County Council and Canada Life since 1995 and worked for Bullough Contract Services between September 2002 and May 2004.... She also had four accounts with the Britannia Building Society

The system does rely a lot on claimants to tell the truth.

A former Wandsworth prison guard and special constable fraudulently claimed £10,627 in housing and council tax benefit. This was straight fraud. She had said she was receiving either job seekers allowance, income support or pension credit, and that she did not own any property, but it emerged that she owned one house and part-owned the home she shared with her husband. She had also failed to declare details of her bank accounts. Surely property ownership can easily be checked as a matter of routine with the Land Registry database? There can't be very many local people called Shirley Bassey Udo-Affia. Astonishingly the Crown Court judge spared her prison.

All these people should routinely have been put through the Voice Risk Analysis software discussed here last week. And all these fraudsters should have been barred from receiving further welfare payments for varying periods.

If the software were used routinely, and if benefit fraudsters were expelled from the benefits system, the combination of these two measures might lead to a sharp reduction in attempts at benefit fraud.

Then enforcement could focus on cases identified as questionable by the software. Comparison of databases should not be labour intensive, and there's probably scope to make it more routine, throwing up further questionable cases for investigation.

These measures would probably be a lot more cost-effective than a national DNA database or ID cards.

Perhaps there's another lesson. Readers' comments on some of these reports show some people seeing MPs as fiddling the system, and suggesting it's one law for them and another for people lower down the scale. MPs, take note as you continue being judge and jury on yourselves.

After all, Derek Conway stole more than any of these people, but apparently that doesn't disqualify him from being an MP.