£1.2 billion DWP Fraud: DWP Underspend, Claimants struggle
Post Categories: DWP • uk government
Tags: Department for Work and Pensions, DWP, DWP Fraud, jobseekers allowance, jsa, NAO, National Audit Office
As a Jobseekers Allowance claimant myself (when my claim hasn’t been stopped or suspended for trivial reasons such as not attending an interview they never told me about) I am not surprised that the National Audit Office (NAO) has reported a £1.2 billion under spend last year.
To stick this figure into prospective (remember it is the DWP as a whole not just JSA) if the figure comprised totally of Jobseekers Allowance at the higher rate of £60 per week, it makes 10 million payments of 20 million benefit weeks not being paid out, or 384,615 claimants a year receiving no Jobseekers Allowance at all even though entitled to do so by law.
In fact this raises a huge question about DWP, Jobcentre Plus; and their repeatedly unlawful tactics and techniques to take ones legal entitlement away, which I will explain later in to the article. As the Jobseekers Act 1995 (as amended) makes it your legal entitlement and the Jobcentre is doing the best to avoid paying that money out to you this comes under fraud in my definition and as such this £1.2 billion under spend will be categorised as a £1.2 billion fraud.
This is on top of the £750 million under spending on the Tax Credits system – resulting in 1.2 million claims not being made. We recently reported about the Jobseekers Allowance Scandal and the quarter of a billion pounds a year Housing Allowance cut.
Fraud
The National Audit Office estimated £900 million has been lost to fraud but equally £900 million has been lost by, guess who… DWP’s own staff!
The NAO estimated £900 million had been lost to fraud, £900 million to “customer” error and £900 million to mistakes by officials. New Deal Scandal estimates this as 288,462 benefit mistakes per week!
Fraud Tactics
Under spend could be because of (including but not limited to):
- Lie detectors on phones (detects tone of voice cant determine benefit fraud) – limits who can legally claim if they are a bit anxious, angry, annoyed or stressed – very common at Jobcentre Plus
- Imposing sanctions unlawfully (some are legal, most are not)
- Terminating claims and suspending claims without notice
- Rapid reclaim and lose backdated payment (1-2 weeks) or new claim with any backdated benefit but will take much longer (a month+, possibly 6 weeks)
Link Summary
5 Responses to “£1.2 billion DWP Fraud: DWP Underspend, Claimants struggle”
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This means (as an average) every DWP member of staff makes 4 (benefit payment related) mistakes every week.
What I mean by “benefit payment related” is rather than clerical errors, these directly result in over paying 4 people a weeks Jobseekers Allowance they aren’t entitled to. Of course, this could relate to smaller amounts of money being overpaid, but as to make it simpler (as we dont have specific statistics with a breakdown of amounts)…
…next time you go to the Jobcentre to sign on or to an adviser appointment, just think, every member of staff you see will make roughly one benefit overpayment “mistake” a day.
Now consider with all the adverts, who really are the bad apples, the jobseekers (in general) or the staff?
How many Jobseekers are branded as a fraudster for benefit fraud when actually DWP overpaid them? Many Jobseekers who are paid into a bank account allow the money to go in and regularly withdraw money without checking statements or balance.
I think that no matter how they do it, there is certainly an air of dishonesty within the JobCentre’s conduct of working. I have never myself been entitled to such benefits, but the enormous amount of graduate friends of mine, are daily finding themselves out of pocket because of “missed appointments” that they were never told about, or asked to re-apply for their benefits, because of a mistake an employee there has made. Even more worryingly, is that many JobCentres are currently advising people not to bother with jobs at all, because some can earn more sat at home on jobseekers. Something is very very wrong here…
article has been pulled – cached version available for short while here
http://74.125.77.132/search?hl=en&source=hp&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fwww.google.com%2Fhostednews%2Fukpress%2Farticle%2FALeqM5jnVRcNSP-g68KgA9Zev_J5LQBBGA&btnG=Google+Search&meta=&aq=f&oq=
best to take a screenshot before it disapears entirely.
Thanks mate. I would have thought Google would store them for at least a year. Obviously not.
I have also noticed the Times website brings back a lot of 404 Page Not Found errors.