20 per cent of those ordered to take part in four-week community projects stop claiming immediately and another 30 per cent are stripped of their benefits when they fail to turn up.What's going on?
Officials suspect many of those who stop claiming benefits are working in the black economy and would rather lose their welfare than give up their undeclared earnings.You don't say. Officials consider the results so "striking" that they are going to roll the scheme out nationally ... to affect up to 50,000 people. The placements are typically with charities or involve some kind of community service, such as helping to maintain parks.
It will cost £5m to arrange the placements and administer them, but if these numbers are replicated it will quickly pay for itself.
- In 2010/11 £4.5bn was paid in JSA. Fraud was estimated at 4.1%, or £180m. Clearly we can't extrapolate a fraud rate of 50% across the board, but it doesn't seem unreasonable to start by doubling the current estimate of JSA fraud. It may well be much more.
4 comments:
I've always said the best method of solving benefit fraud would be to make collecting it dependent on actually turning up everyday somewhere, and having to do something, however simple and menial for a reasonable amount of time. Thus if you are genuine, there would be no reason not to go and do your few hours labour and collect your money. But if you were working elsewhere you can't be in two places at once, so you'd have to choose between your paid job and going to get the benefits. Similarly, if you were just lazy and couldn't be arsed to turn up, we wouldn't have to pay you that day.
Either way the taxpayer is a winner.
And there is another advantage to my system - its infinitely more flexible for the claimant than the existing one. One of the biggest problem with claiming any benefit is the lag time from claiming to getting any money. Under my scheme if you lost your job on Friday, you have the 100% guarantee that if you turn up at the Benefits depot at 9am Monday morning and do your 3 hours work (or whatever) you get cash. And you can do that every day until you find new employment. No complicated form filling, no bureaucracy. Simple.
And there could be no fraud, because while you could try and get someone to go and do your hours for you, why would they when they then couldn't get any money themselves?
It's not a representative sample of those on JSA as the numbers in the pilots was very small and the placements were only offered to a small number of claimants. So one cannot reach any conclusions with any degree of reliability.
Agreed, Investigator, that's exactly why I didn't just project a 50% cut in the JSA bill.
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