ASTRONOMICAL WELFARE FRAUD!

Is anyone surprised? Benefits fraud and mistakes are so "astronomical" the figures are rounded up to the nearest half-a-billion pounds.In the three years up to 2003/4 £3bn was lost in fraud or error, says a report from the influential Commons public accounts committee. Government replies by saying that fraud is at an all time low! Seriously!

This is a truly Orwellian Government that tells us day is night and night is day. It is the biggest FRAUD of all - but will we ever get rid of it?

Comments

[EU Serf]

I have to disagree. Its the second biggest Fraud ever.

The First?

Why ever closer union of course.

[Peter]

Actually, tax fraud is much higher and may be as much as £10 billion per annum.

[Snafu]

The BBC points out that it was worse in 1997!!

[DST]

Tax fraud is so high because the government make it worth people's while to dodge taxes. Reduce taxes - make them simpler - and tax fraud will go down.

Not that there is a real equivalence between tax fraud and dodgy scroungey benefit fraud...

[Peter]

DST wrote:
"Not that there is a real equivalence between tax fraud and dodgy scroungey benefit fraud..."

Why are they not equivalent? Both are robbing the public purse. Both are theft.

[Mark Holland]

Both are theft.

Dunno, tax avoidance seems like a civic duty. Slipping one's wedge to Switzerland is a national sport in Germany.

[DST]

Well... One is "people preventing the government from hoovering up their hard-earneds"... The other is "people cheating a system that exists to pay them for *not* working using money extracted from workers as a *penalty* for working"

Not that I condone tax fraud! Just that I think there's a moral difference here...

[Jo]

Doesnt the amount of unclaimed benefit more than balance out the fraudulently claimed element?

[David Vance]

No. Fraud is fraud and those who perpetrate it should be punished. Unclaimed benefit, as you put it, is saved tax-payer money and if there was any justice it should be returned to those of us it has been stolen off in the first instance.

[NRG]

How much is wasted in made up jobs and unnecessary expenditure to mis administer such a complicated tax regime. A simple flat tax regime might well cost less to manage, will penalise workers less and raise more money for the public purse. Unfortunately the thousands of labour votes that have been bought by giving people people inland revenue jobs make that very unlikley.

[David Vance]

NRG,

I agree with you. I favour a flat tax but I also favour small Government that allows us to keep most of our income so we may spent it as WE see fit! But you're right - Brown has bought tens of thousands of souls who are now paraitically grafted onto the UK wage bill. Had I my way, they would all be sacked forthwith. They contribute NOTHING.

[Peter]

Flat tax or whatever, any attempt to justify tax fraud while condemning benefit fraud reeks of double standards. It's THAT simple.

[Jo]

"Reduce taxes - make them simpler - and tax fraud will go down."

..and the Left are accused of naivety?
Ever heard of plain ol' Greed, DST???

[levee]

David: I think your earlier point about having stolen money returned to the taxpayer is interesting. Unfeasible, but interesting.

Perhaps if more of us saw a tangible advantage to shopping benefit fraudsters, more of us might pick up the phone! As it is, if I were to inform on someone committing benefit fraud, the money will be reabsorbed into government.

[Allan@Aberdeen]

I don't believe that the findings point to fraud as is normally understood. The money has been distributed wrongly because of the complexity of the systems set up by the most meddlesome, megalomaniacal, incompetent clot of a man ever to darken the doorway of 11 Downing Street. Let's pray to whomever our God is that Gordon Brown never becomes PM.

[Zendo Deb]

You there across the pond.... You need someone like Bill Clinton - to end welfare as you know it.

There was much wailing and gnashing of teeth on this side of the pond. But when we said that if you were not disabled, (or fit into a few other well-defined categories) you got 2 years on the dole and that was it. Get out and find a job.

The predictions of mass starvations and increased crime - as people left the welfare rolls - failed to materialize and our crime rate is holding near 30 year lows... well off the highs we saw during the early 90s. And millions of people have been removed from the dole.

(I say this and I really hated Clinton. But as they say, "Only Nixon could go to China.")

[Peter]

Zendo, interesting post. I'm all for forcing the layabouts to work and pay taxes like the rest of us. Clinton did well.

But I suspect the drop in crime has - ahem - demographic reasons as well. Especially the fall in the birth-rate which means that a lot fewer young males are around as a percentage of the total population to, er, do the crime...

[Zendo Deb]

The point was that forcing people off the dole did NOT push them into a life of crime.