The Purple Scorpion set up another 'blog a while back called Benefit Fraud.
It's a good scrapbook of benefit fraud stories that he updates regularly and is well worth a visit every now and then.
(IMHO, there's little of this that couldn't be fixed by replacing all benefits with a single, age-related payment, aka a Citizen's Income - remembering always that fraud, error and administration costs for flat-rate benefits such as Child Benefit are barely measureable - but that's another topic.)
Nothing
4 hours ago
6 comments:
I'd agree, Mark but it needs to be introduced gradually, accompanied by drop in taxation, shift to taxing spending rather than income, weaning welfare recipients who are on it for social reasons off it and so on.
This government won't do it - they'd lose their iron control on their voters.
If they raise the threshold of the basic tax allowance, they'd be removing a costly bureaucratic layer and put money into people's pockets at the same time. I haven't costed this, of course!
JH, I hate this idea of "taxing spending" as it's politicians' code for "stealth taxation" like VAT, which is, as previously discussed, a tax on gross margins and The Worst Tax Of All.
The only 'spending' worth taxing is imputed rents on owner occupied housing, aka Land Value Tax, which is a nice "in-your-face-tax" - unlike VAT it is not a tax on production (although indirectly it is a tax on incomes as richer people live in more expensive houses).
Fausty, as it happens, if a single person earns £200 per week, he gets £20 PAYE/NIC deducted but can claim £20 in Tax Credits. So a £10k personal allowance is perfectly affordable and do-able, and yes I have costed it.
Mark - many thanks.
Headlines: benefit fraud is £2bn+, not the £800m the government pretends, plus tax credit fraud around £250m. This is bad for society & bad for taxpayers. The government has no strategy to cut it - see the website.
JP, my pleasure.
I take a wider view than you and bracket 'fraud, error and overpayments' together, it being difficult to draw a line between outright fraud (e.g. false identity) and 'giving oneself the benefit of the doubt' and simply not understanding the rules properly.
It is widely accepted that Tax Credits FEO payments are about £1 - £2 billion, i.e. about ten per cent of the total paid out, and that for all benefits as a whole, the FEO rate is at least five per cent, which gives us an overall FEO cost of £5 billion - £10 billion.
But outright fraud must be a third of that, so £2 billion looks 'about right' to me.
SL, I helped the Citizen's Income Trust with these workings, which is on a 'fiscally neutral' basis.
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