A Newport man who falsely claimed more than £26,000 in incapacity benefit was ordered to pay everything back by a court.
Bernard Foster appeared in Cardiff Crown Court for a hearing under the Proceeds of Crime Act, which allows courts to confiscate money gained through illegal activities.
Foster was given a nine-month sentence, suspended for two years, and made the subject of a 12-month supervision order and a curfew between 7pm and 6am, after being found guilty of dishonestly failing to notify the Department of Work and Pensions (DWP) of a change in circumstances, following a trial in August last year.
At the sentencing hearing in October, prosecutor Nuhu Gobir said Foster started claiming incapacity benefit in 1996 when he started experiencing back problems and it was accepted that he was unable to work.
The court heard Foster continued to claim legitimate benefits for a number of years, but in 2004, he failed to disclose the fact he received money from the sale of his marital home, and the money was used to buy a holiday home in Pembrokeshire.
Mr Gobir said the overpayment between 2004 and Foster’s arrest in 2007 was £23,961.
Representing Foster, Mark Jackson said the claim was not fraudulent from the outset and Foster asked what he could do to rectify the situation in his first interview.
Mr Jackson said Foster’s benefits have been suspended since his arrest in 2007 and he has been living off money from his daughters.
He said: “It’s a position he got himself into. He has no one to blame but himself and he accepts that responsibility. He is not attempting to shy away from it.”
On Friday, Judge Neil Bidder QC ruled Foster's total benefit to be £26,118.20 and ordered him to pay back the full amount within six months.
This took absolute ages. With the potential number of benefit frauds around, the process needs to be far more streamlined.
3 comments:
Don't get this. Incapacity Benefit is not means tested, so should not be affected by the second home or his capital. Unclear reporting?
It was an overpayment of Income Support, not IB
It can take a long time to bring to court usually because the person concnered has Appealed the decision made by DWP or Local Authority, and will try every avenue of the dispute process. Courts too, as with the Tribunals are swamped with case work, so are the benefits adjudicating authorities. The customers themselves usually make the job much harder by refusing to cooperate with the investigation or delaying tactics. The statutory requriements to actually get an investigation going, then obtaining evidcence, then to make any decision detrimental to a customer , are very complex, ostesibly to 'protect' the genuine cases/individuals. The system has been abused, it was never set up to take that level of abuse, hense the safeguards and/or the procedures are either not sufficient or take a very long time/ not sufficiently resourced. Dont forget that the onus of proof to show abuse of the systenm is HEAVILY weighted against the DWP/Authority
Post a Comment