More benefit frauds

The Sun alleges Karen Matthews committed benefit fraud of nearly £400 a week by claiming she was sole support for her four children who were living with her, while in fact her supermarket fishmonger boyfriend was living there. The paper reports:

The family own a widescreen television and had bought two computers. Social workers had given them a third for Matthews’ eleven-year-old son.

A Swansea man has admitted receiving almost £22,000 in benefit he was not entitled to. Between April 2003 and October 2005, he failed to tell the DWP that he had money in excess of the permitted £8,000 and was overpaid just over £17,000 in income support. He also failed to tell Swansea Council about the money and was overpaid £4,631 in housing tax benefit and council tax benefit between May 2004 and October 2005.

An Edinburgh woman who cheated a benefits agency out of almost £23,000 said she used the money to buy her children gifts. She had failed to volunteer that she was back in work. This went on for three years. She also admitted obtaining £5,800 in carer's allowance and £104 in housing benefit and council tax. Three years! You have to wonder why database matching isn't routine. Not a regular special exercise, but routine. People in the black economy are harder to catch, but it should be a piece of cake to identify claimants who are paying tax and national insurance. Shouldn't it?

The Sun also claims that the woman who gave birth at 57 had been a benefits cheat. She admitted using fake documents to claim over £4,300 in housing and council tax benefit. "She also allegedly raked in £15,000 after her 79-year-old mum Gladys died in 2001 by continuing to claim her £600-a-month war widow’s pension."

A Tamworth man falsely claimed a total of £9,113 made up of £7,177 in housing benefit and £1,936 in council tax benefit over three years after failing to declare he was in full time employment. Again, the system relied on him to tell the truth and lose a lot of money.

A Greenock woman accepted housing and council tax benefit totalling £3,500 over a four-year period without disclosing income she received from a job - with the NHS. This is just ridiculous. The government is slurping out our money - not theirs - without the most basic checking in place.

More spectacularly, a Birmingham woman claimed nearly £57,000 worth of disability benefits over 11 years despite working for the entire time. This was no black economy job: she was working as a housing officer at Moseley and District Churches Housing Association.

Talking of elementary checks, a man from Weston-super-Mare claimed more than £85,000 in child tax benefits for 16 fake children over a four-year period after he and his partner realised they did not have to send children's birth certificates to tax officials to prove they existed. They lived in a one-room property and he was a known gambling addict, with 85 previous convictions for fraud. No chance of getting that money back.

A Watford woman wrongly claimed benefit. Her offence was not to notify Watford Borough Council or the DWP that her hours worked had increased to more than 16 a week. This time the DWP became aware of a change in her circumstances following a data matching exercise comparing records held with them and other agencies. She was overpaid more than £2,700.

Sometimes it gets too complicated. A Market Harborough woman admitted benefit fraud of £4,811. When it came to the council's attention that her boyfriend might be living with her, they launched what they called a ‘significant’ surveillance operation that included monitoring how many times his vehicle was seen outside her home, finding out he had registered at a local GPs, and discovering that he had told his bank her address was his. According to her lawyer:

The problem was a lack of definition about what constituted living together. Her boyfriend was not supporting her so she had carried on claiming benefit.

But that wasn't the problem at all. Who's going to pay for the surveillance? Did they really need to spend all that time to construct a case?