DWP benefit fraud exposed as criminals use these 3 | European Markets

DWP advantages fraudsters are stealing up to £10,000 a yr with growing numbers dishonest the system, an MP has warned after visiting his native job centre.

Damien Egan, MP for Bristol North East, spoke to work coaches on the job centre in his space who’ve labored there for over 40 years, and was instructed “they’ve never seen it so bad” in phrases of fraudulent claims.

Chatting with the Work and Pensions Committee on which he sits, Mr Egan shared particulars of one worrying pattern: “I was surprised to hear that people were getting money for health benefits even when it might just say ‘no can work’.

“Then it might take months and months and months earlier than work functionality kicked in, after which there was a repeat sample when these people have been discovered match for work, after which would come back into the system with one thing else. It wasn’t being checked.”

Universal Credit claimants often have to undergo a work capability assessment to find out to what extent they can work and what requirements there should be for them to look for a job or to increase their hours.

One of the work coaches told the MP that people can also abuse the self-employed expenses scheme, as you can boost your benefits by £10,000 a year using “varied bills”.

Mr Egan warned: “The system is not checking it. It is simply too straightforward.” He went on to say that the work coaches have found efforts to tackle fraud have dipped despite the growing problem.

The MP said: “They have been saying that as fraud has been going up, the quantity of investigations and prosecutions has been going down. So it is created this good storm. Prison gangs are exploiting the system.”

He was speaking on the committee during a meeting with officials from the DWP, to discuss its efforts to tackle fraud as new legislation is coming in allowing officials to check details of bank statements and take money directly from people’s bank accounts, in cases of fraud.

DWP representatives said they are stepping up their efforts to tackle fraud, including working with the Home Office using their border records to show when claimants are going in and out of the UK in breach of their benefit rules.

They also said that efforts to make tax digital through HMRC will help with the self-employed expenses issue, as the DWP will have access to more of that data.

Mr Egan also asked if there have been increased prosecutions of fraudsters. In response, Neil Couling, director general of Fraud, Disability and Health and senior responsible owner of Universal Credit, said: “Fraud is such a huge quantity that you would be able to’t prosecute your approach out this downside.

“We are reserving our prosecutions for the most egregious, the big organised cases. So for individualised frauds, there’s a series of administrative penalties that we would apply, rather than go to the courts.

“The courts themselves are very busy with their own backlogs of prosecutions that they’re making an attempt to work by.”

There was a spike in benefit fraud during the coronavirus pandemic, when there was a huge rise in claims. During this period, there were 2.4 million new claims, with 100,000 claims in a single day at times. The DWP hopes to recover £1.7billion this year in savings from fraud and error.

New powers in the F raud, Error and Recovery bill will allow investigators to request bank statements in cases of fraud, to verify that a person has the money to pay up, and officials will be allowed to deduct funds from a person’s account.

Critics of the new measures fear people could be wrongly targeted and that taking money from a person’s bank account could put people in financial hardship.

But Mr Couling said these powers will only be used as a last resort: “We make it possible for people to pay this money back. We do not go straight to those powers. These are conversations.”

He added: “The entire course of and the purpose of the powers is designed to encourage people to pay what they owe. It is not that we are saying you are a fraudster, we’re going straight to your bank account, it simply would not work in that approach.”