Benefit Fraud-Govt to check your personal details to find cheats

[Titanic99]

Personally I think this is one of the better ideas from this Government as no-one should condone Fraud within the system.

 

I’m not sure how this will sit with those Libdem supporters on here who argued against the previous Governments intrusion into our personal lives though.

 

http://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/politics/credit-agencies-lined-up-to-pinpoint-benefit-cheats-2015258.html

[Rupert_Baehr]

Stopping fraud is a good thing, but will there be adequate redress for people who are wrongly accused by the Credit Agencies?

 

'Sorry, we got it wrong' won't do. If the government want to use Private Companies, then IMO they should protect the public against ****-ups made by those companies and provide compensation where the company can be shown to have got it wrong.

[HeadingNorth]

Stopping fraud is a good thing, but will there be adequate redress for people who are wrongly accused by the Credit Agencies?

 

 

Since the credit agencies will be identifying potential fraudsters, there shouldn't be any necessity for it. Only after the DWP has then checked the flagged cases should there be any action taken.

[Darth Vader]

I'm loving Experian's 'lower income families living in urban terraced houses' are more likely to commit fraud LOL. Not in my experience. I hope they'll be weeding out all the ones on the higher brackets too who fiddle much more.

[pattricia]

I'm loving Experian's 'lower income families living in urban terraced houses' are more likely to commit fraud LOL. Not in my experience. I hope they'll be weeding out all the ones on the higher brackets too who fiddle much more.

 

Let them take a look at the fiddling MPs.

[Ms Macbeth]

I'm loving Experian's 'lower income families living in urban terraced houses' are more likely to commit fraud LOL. Not in my experience. I hope they'll be weeding out all the ones on the higher brackets too who fiddle much more.

 

I hope so too. But in this quote they were referring to benefit fraud, which is probably more likely in low income families. People with lots of money who commit fraud are more likely to be tax evaders.

[Berberis]

I heard that tax fraud costs the country 15x more than benefit fraud.

 

What people spend their benefits on is down to them. If they want to subscribe to Sky TV but eat beans on toast all year round, that is their choice!

[Ms Macbeth]

I heard that tax fraud costs the country 15x more than benefit fraud.

 

What people spend their benefits on is down to them. If they want to subscribe to Sky TV but eat beans on toast all year round, that is their choice!

 

It is when they've got their benefits legitimately. I think 'fraud' relates more to people like the guy in this clip: http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/manchester/10560307.stm

 

You couldn't make it up!

[L00b]

I hope so too. But in this quote they were referring to benefit fraud, which is probably more likely in low income families. People with lots of money who commit fraud are more likely to be tax evaders.

 

Experian is also negotiating with the DWP over ways of clamping down on fraudulent claims of incapacity benefit, claiming to be able to achieve savings of £300m. Again using information about consumer spending, it would attempt to pinpoint households who appeared to be living beyond the means of a benefit claimant, such as building up large lines of credit

I may be wrong (hope I am, actually), but I got the distinct impression -conveyed in no small part by the media over the past year and a bit- that quite a lot of families struggling as a result of the recession have been resorting to, indeed, "building up large lines of credit".

 

Now, again I sumise, probably not so many of these are claiming incapacity benefit, but in view of the above, I would expect the 'credit line figures' to be somewhat biased by current events/circumstances in a lot of cases.

 

I wonder if Experian's statistical modelling takes that into account?

 

A very dangerous precedent, if this goes through. In terms of invasion of privacy, this is much worse, by some orders of magnitude, than anything NuLab put through in the past few years (and I'm really not a NuLab -or just Lab- fan at all!). The likes of Experian have been collating just about everyone's consumption/finance data for years already, whether people ticked the little privacy boxes on forms or not (since they can cross-ref everything to at least a bank/credit card or account number, and that piece of data identifies the account-/cardholder just as surely as an ID card/passport in 99.99% of cases). If the "conduit" to the Gvt opens, this will give Whitehall the kind of individual + searchable information about just about everyone, that any totalitarian state could only ever dream of getting back in the days.

[cloudybay]

Let them take a look at the fiddling MPs.

 

and those closer to home whom claim to be unable to do paid work yet are able to do lots of good work for charity.