Single person benefit fraud

I wrote here about a married woman who was claiming benefit on the basis that she was a single parent, and commented:

You would think the DWP would check whether someone claiming to be single was married. Apparently not.

A contributor has made this useful comment:

It doesn't surprise me at all that they wouldn't check that someone claiming to be single was married. It would be a time consuming and expensive process - most of the records are not on a database, and marriage certificates only carry the age of the person and not the date of birth.

If, after the IDS reforms, lying about being married continues to be a passport to taxpayers' cash, government needs a cost/benefit analysis of creating a database of marriages. Of course that won't capture less formal partnerships.

We're losing upwards of £3.5bn a year to benefit fraud. So it's desirable that any route to taxpayers' cash should be checkable.