Benefit cheats face higher fines and losing their homes
Iain Duncan Smith hails £50 billion of welfare savings but ministers plan a new crackdown on benefit cheats after £3.5billion was lost to fraud and error
Welfare cheats will be forced to sell their homes and pay higher fines to reimburse taxpayers for the money they have wrongly claimed, under plans to tackle benefit fraud.
Hundreds of thousands of pensioners who fail to declare their full earnings from private pension schemes will also be targeted as fraud investigators trawl through HM Revenue & Customs records.
The plans form part of a major campaign from ministers this week to publicise reforms to the welfare system, which the Conservatives regard as among their most popular, vote-winning policies.
Ministers will highlight the scale of savings to taxpayers, announce a tougher stance on fraud and detail further action to limit welfare for migrants. Polls suggest that even Labour supporters now regard state benefits as too generous.
Writing for The Telegraph, Iain Duncan Smith, the Work and Pensions Secretary, promises that his reforms will have saved taxpayers £50 billion over the course of the Coalition’s five years in power. The welfare budget forms the biggest part of public expenditure. The Government spent £166 billion on benefits and state pensions to more than 20 million people last year. However, £3.5 billion was “lost” to fraud and payments made in error, an increase from £3.3 billion in 2010.
Ministers aim to reduce the proportion of benefits lost to fraud and error from 2.2 per cent in 2010 to 1.7 per cent by next March.
So far, the proportion of welfare spending lost to fraud has fallen to only 2.1 per cent, while more money is now lost to fraud than four years ago.
This month’s package of plans represents the Government’s last realistic chance to meet its goal. The reforms include:
:: A drive to recover debts owed by fraudsters. Ministers will work with private debt collection firms “to make greater use of bailiffs to seize assets” and “force house sales where appropriate”, officials said. The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) expects to recover at least £414 million as a result of the initiative.
:: Higher fines for cheats caught committing benefits fraud. Officials can already impose a £50 spot fine on individuals who mistakenly and carelessly provide inaccurate information in their claims, and fraudsters face a minimum fine of £350 as an alternative to prosecution. Plans this week are expected to set out new financial penalties.
:: A publicity campaign, including posters urging claimants to report those whom they suspect to be cheating the system, and letters warning individuals to check they are not receiving too much.
:: Existing claimants will be cross-checked against HMRC records to catch pensioners who are receiving extra income than they have declared from private schemes, while also claiming pension credit, a means-tested benefit.
:: A benefit fraud division will be set up within the DWP. The service will pursue people who make false claims, including housing welfare from councils, tax credits from the HMRC, and other DWP payouts.
Officials estimate that fraud by pensioners failing to declare their full income cost taxpayers £170 million last year, up from £140 million in 2012 and more than the £150 million lost to jobseeker’s allowance fraud by those falsely claiming to be out of work.
The investigation into HMRC records will also identify workers who are paid more than they have declared to benefits officers.
Officials expect to find 300,000 pensioners and workers who are claiming benefits to which they are not entitled because they have not declared their full income. The system will be tried out this month.
In a speech this week, Mr Duncan Smith will hail the progress he has made in reforming the welfare system over the past year. Writing for The Telegraph, he rejects claims that his reforms will condemn thousands to a “Dickensian” way of life.
“If you’d listened to the scaremongers, you’d be forgiven for thinking we were ripping up the welfare state and telling people to fend for themselves. In fact, what we are doing is returning the welfare state to what it was meant to be: a safety net, not a way of life.”
Mr Duncan Smith’s speech will be followed by further announcements on limits to welfare payments for new migrants.
David Cameron has sought to address public concern over immigration by imposing limits on welfare for citizens of other European Union countries. Measures include a ban on unemployed migrants claiming housing benefit, which is due to come into force this month.
Migrants from other EU countries will be banned from receiving housing benefit if they are already receiving jobseeker’s allowance, worth up to £71 per week.
This was the real reason behind Universal Credit. To administer this benefit it required the HRMC to link up with the DWP & Local councils, and the ability to check your bank accounts. Now at long last, they have all the pieces in place to check up on everyone claiming ANY type of benefit/tax/pension/credit.
It wont matter if the mistake was theirs, as stated in the article, they are putting the onus on claimants to make sure they are not claiming too much.
How long will it be before we start seeing pensioners topping themselves?
Well now you'll get a bunch of dirty homeless immigrants begging for pennies and dressing as ladies giving blowjobs behind dumpsters. Is that what you want?
my limbless friend will die alone
a torso of flesh upon the throne
Violence is not the answer, it is the question. the answer is yes.
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Benefit cheats face higher fines and losing their homes
06 Apr 2014 11:26 #4
Well how about cutting any benefits completely then you can fucking moan you tool
Thats fine, but in return I'd want to never pay any tax...ever. Not a penny. No VAT, no TV license, no road tax, no council tax, no fuck all.
If that happened then I'd be OK with it, but they increase taxes while reducing services which are 'supposed' to pay for it because they want more and more to piss away on their cronies and mismanagement and their own benefits packages for politicians and bankers.
If we didn't pay taxes then they wouldn't have a job so they can f-off basically. Its plain to any moron who are the real drains on society, the trouble is most voters are lower life forms than morons so they don't see it.
“Fascists are not human. A snake is more human.” - Hugo Chávez
Well how about cutting any benefits completely then you can fucking moan you tool
Thats fine, but in return I'd want to never pay any tax...ever. Not a penny. No VAT, no TV license, no road tax, no council tax, no fuck all.
If that happened then I'd be OK with it, but they increase taxes while reducing services which are 'supposed' to pay for it because they want more and more to piss away on their cronies and mismanagement and their own benefits packages for politicians and bankers.
If we didn't pay taxes then they wouldn't have a job so they can f-off basically. Its plain to any moron who are the real drains on society, the trouble is most voters are lower life forms than morons so they don't see it.
+1 I don't think I could cope if I had to go on benefits (touch wood)
I could, however, cope just fine if i could be self sufficient/self reliant. Thats not gonna happen anytime soon though
Too many laws preventing it.
The law and society in general says do it their way or fuck off.
Well how about cutting any benefits completely then you can fucking moan you tool
Thats fine, but in return I'd want to never pay any tax...ever. Not a penny. No VAT, no TV license, no road tax, no council tax, no fuck all.
If that happened then I'd be OK with it, but they increase taxes while reducing services which are 'supposed' to pay for it because they want more and more to piss away on their cronies and mismanagement and their own benefits packages for politicians and bankers.
If we didn't pay taxes then they wouldn't have a job so they can f-off basically. Its plain to any moron who are the real drains on society, the trouble is most voters are lower life forms than morons so they don't see it.
+1 I don't think I could cope if I had to go on benefits (touch wood)
I could, however, cope just fine if i could be self sufficient/self reliant. Thats not gonna happen anytime soon though
Too many laws preventing it.
The law and society in general says do it their way or fuck off.
Exactly. Their own laws prevent it because they want obedient reliant consumers.
“Fascists are not human. A snake is more human.” - Hugo Chávez
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Benefit cheats face higher fines and losing their homes
06 Apr 2014 13:25 #8
This unnatural lifestyle is destroying the mental health of millions.
I totally agree with you scrappydoo.
From mental health to various other stress related issues,heart problems,blood pressure and so on.
All of these would not be a problem if people were allowed to live a more natural life.
If you consider how people have been trapped into thinking they are living a full life through owning gadgets and other distractions and competing against their neighbour,it's a far reach from how they should be living.
Obviously this doesn't help anybody who will suffer from the actions of Ian Duncan Smith but i consider it to be at the root of most problems in society.
It really is sad though,the fact i get to type on a keyboard about how life should be,feeling like a caged bird with toys to distract it.
Fraud and ERROR says the article and yet they do not break down how much of that £3.5 billion was lost in fraud and lost in error. IDS talks of using powers to force sale of homes and using bailiffs (which is costly in itself) but says nothing about how his department will effect changes to prevent error. The entire article continues to paint a picture that the problem is majoritively active fraud but backs this up with nothing.
Using bailiffs is another stupid idea as the costs associated with bailiffs more often then not outweigh the amounts being recovered.
I also cannot help but agree that a huge part of the problem is that people are not allowed to be as self sufficient as possible. It is all well and good painting people as being 'scroungers and skivers' when they have no option left to them but to seek government assistance if they are unable to find work - and often the reason they cannot find work is due to governmental/financial meddling in the markets in order to line their own pockets.
Sometimes, if you stand on the bottom rail of a bridge and lean over to watch the river slipping slowly away beneath you, you will suddenly know everything there is to be known.
“Just living is not enough, one must have sunshine, freedom, and a little flower”
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Benefit cheats face higher fines and losing their homes
06 Apr 2014 15:57 #13
I also cannot help but agree that a huge part of the problem is that people are not allowed to be as self sufficient as possible. It is all well and good painting people as being 'scroungers and skivers' when they have no option left to them but to seek government assistance if they are unable to find work - and often the reason they cannot find work is due to governmental/financial meddling in the markets in order to line their own pockets.
This is emphatically the case, and it’s not even begun to unfold yet. It’s going to get far worse, not better. All this pissing about with benefit is not going to make a rat’s arse of a difference to anything, except that it’s going to induce needless misery on a lot of poor and vulnerable people.
Jobs and careers are increasingly going to be a thing of the past. In any economic context the huge corporations that now completely dominate the economy look to shave jobs right, left and centre. Here’s just one example:
HSBC set to axe 30,000 worldwide jobs despite £7bn profit
But there are many other factors coming and here now, sophisticated automation and robotics, improved AI, etc, plus an increasingly globalised ‘labour market’. There are billions of people all over the world that are accustomed to living in abject poverty, and increasingly ‘Western’ people, who thought they were morally and ethically superior in some sense, will find themselves competing with these people for work.
Austerity is really an ideological indication that many human-beings are not needed any more. This has been going on for many years in a wide variety of ways; the so-called War on Drugs is a classic example of attempting to profit from the poor by locking them up in private prisons and getting them to work for less than a dollar an hour. This is normal in other parts of the world, you don’t even have to lock people up in order to achieve it!
The second indication that many human-beings are no longer needed is that the only social class that is growing is the underclass. This has been emphatically the case on a global level for generations:
But now it’s quite demonstrably happening in the ‘West’ as well:
That’s before you go into the fact that the banking system has been allowed to suck all the wealth and everything of value out of virtually every nation, and now virtually every major nation is completely broke.
The reality of the situation is that the overwhelming majority of human-beings are vulnerable in such a culture, no matter what social class they may think they are. If you’re not needed by the economic system, which can happen very quickly (ask certain bankers who were laid off during the 2008 ‘crash’), then you will be summarily dismissed. Given the level of average savings in Britain:
Eight million Britons have no savings, study reveals...another 15 million 'making no effort' to save for the future according to research which also shows a rise in parental loans.
Then anyone could end up on benefit at any moment. Again, this is before you go into the massively inflated housing market, inflated almost without exception by investors, which is a constant, debilitating drain on the UK.
You would hope by now that people would see this, recognise that no matter what job they do and what their financial status is that they’re easily dispensable, and that it would no longer be possible to write stupid ‘articles’ demonising benefit claimants in shitty, not-good-enough-to-wipe-your-arse-on ‘newspapers’. And that people would realise that in this elitist society that white collar wokers, blue collar workers and benefit claimant alike all have far more in common than the people that run the society.
However, I’m sure in this atomised, materialistic, self-absorbed society we will see the total opposite, and as we circle the drain ever more rapidly we will see people desperately clinging to their illusory sense of status, self and ego in a vain attempt to convince themselves that anything other than the total rape and pillage of society at large is taking place. entrangermercenary1 wrote:
Well how about cutting any benefits completely then you can fucking moan you tool
And, of course, some people are pretty damned stupid...
The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. The true measure of a man is this: how quickly he can respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give - Philip K. Dick.
Well now you'll get a bunch of dirty homeless immigrants begging for pennies and dressing as ladies giving blowjobs behind dumpsters. Is that what you want?
Yes you have a point. Been caught out a few times when feeling the stubble on the todger
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Benefit cheats face higher fines and losing their homes
06 Apr 2014 20:03 #17
Well how about cutting any benefits completely then you can fucking moan you tool
Thats fine, but in return I'd want to never pay any tax...ever. Not a penny. No VAT, no TV license, no road tax, no council tax, no fuck all.
If that happened then I'd be OK with it, but they increase taxes while reducing services which are 'supposed' to pay for it because they want more and more to piss away on their cronies and mismanagement and their own benefits packages for politicians and bankers.
If we didn't pay taxes then they wouldn't have a job so they can f-off basically. Its plain to any moron who are the real drains on society, the trouble is most voters are lower life forms than morons so they don't see it.
Id quote wubwubs post as well but as its a full page of irrelevant drivel no need.
Now it seems you and wub are becoming a right pair of elitist cunts, seems the common man to you both is just to thick to understand anything. IMF/EMF
Guess who else trots out them lines...oh yes the politicians when making policy...we make is as the common man wont understand it, they say. Yet you deride them to the hilt
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Benefit cheats face higher fines and losing their homes
06 Apr 2014 20:14 #18
Now it seems you and wub are becoming a right pair of elitist cunts, seems the common man to you both is just to thick to understand anything. IMF/EMF
This is a logical fallacy because what I wrote is the complete opposite of advocating elitism. You can't really legitimately accuse someone of being elitist for deriding elitism; it doesn't make any sense.
Not in itself a huge surprise, I know.
The true measure of a man is not his intelligence or how high he rises in this freak establishment. The true measure of a man is this: how quickly he can respond to the needs of others and how much of himself he can give - Philip K. Dick.
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then you can fucking moan you tool 
