Pension fraud was undetected for four years

Allan Cruickshank, from Portland, has admitted dishonestly obtaining £9,558 of pension credit. The prosecution asked for a further 212 similar matters to be taken into consideration.

He was not entitled to claim pension credit because he was already receiving an occupational pension from the Armed Forces - remarkably this went undiscovered for four years.

The defence said that Cruickshank informed the DWP that he was also receiving an Army pension and was told this did not affect his application for incapacity benefit. He was then advised to move from the benefit to pension credit in 2004 and wrongly assumed that his Army pension would not affect his working pension credit claim. He then became aware that the Army pension would affect this and by then he had been claiming for a while and he decided to continue not to declare this in the hope he would get away with it.
Magistrates gave him a 12-month community order during which he must complete 200 hours of unpaid work.The DWP is making its own arrangements to recover the money.

So much for data matching then. Government databases don't communicate. They owe it to taxpayers and to claimants to plug this big loophole.