£50.00 fine for making an error on completing a form

I heard George Osborne announce on the radio that thre are plans to fine claimants £50.00 if they make an error when completing a form and this has been repeated on the Daily Express website-  Am I alone in thinking I have slipped into a parallel universe where Margaret Thatcher is still prime minister!

And how much will officials be fined for making errors?

hi

attached link to rightsnet news story - Introduction of three year benefit sanction for ‘third strike’ fraud offences on new DWP and HMRC fraud and error strategy which unveils £50 ‘civil penalty’.

cheers ros

Not sure if anyone else has read through this document in full - but after reading it I am genuinly scared for claimants.  Departments carrying out telephone reviews of all claims, penalties for ‘errors’, and every claimant tarred with the brush of guilty until proved innocent. 

God help the welfare benefits world…...

The government seems keen on conflating the two losses to the public purse, fraud and error. From the Ministerial Foreword to ‘Tackling fraud and error in the benefit and tax credits systems’:

This document sets out a radical new approach for addressing welfare fraud, which now costs the taxpayer £5.2 billion pounds every year, or £165 every second.

Elsewhere in the document, the £5.2 billion figure is correctly labelled as being due to both fraud and error, with most of it in fact being error.

It isn’t clear to me if mere customer error is intended to incur these £50 penalties.

Yes you’re right.  As usual they have deliberately conflated the message about fraud and error (including errors by DWP/LA staff). 

One would not mind so much if they expended as much hot air going on about the mistakes made by DWP staff which lead to OPs and the consistent, elementary errors they make in overpayment amounts and recoverability decisions, let alone the gargantuan losses to tax evasion.

Frankly they could do themselves a favour and slash the fraud and error losses if they had some decent quality control processes for overpayment decision making.

However, they do at least acknowledge that most fraud is caused by people drifting into not reporting changes of circs and that the system is too “passive” because people have little contact with the benefits bureaucracy and thus few prompts to report these changes and they also recognise the absurd complexity of the system which makes OPs inevitable

These proposals are not just about fraud and will impact on all WR advisers. There are lots of potentially very unpleasant steps DWP say they will take - power to recover DWP official error OPs (major changes to s71 SSAAA required), very severe enforcement actions which appear not to be limited to fraud cases (lose your home because of an official error overpayment?). 

History teaches us that such powers can easily be misused by benefit officials. 

Benefit fraud is wrongly used as a key justification for cutting benefits and the constant amplification of it by the DWP and LAs undermines the entire benefits system and severely stigmatises all claimants.

Yes - it really is very worrying.  I can foresee even more delay in getting claims into payment & all sorts of problems if their various checks result in them coming to overpayment/fraud decisions.

On a lighter note it is encouraging to see from the pie charts on p.12 that HMRC Tax Credits have no official error!  But they do explain in a little note at foot of p.13 that that is because any there is can be corrected at the year end!  I can’t say that accords with my experience - or am I just jaundiced & cynical?

I imagine this will necessitate advisers requiring clients to sign a legal disclaimer prior to assisting with completion of any forms or information requests, as there is a possibility of our being held liable for any inconsistencies.

In addition, one can only speculate how many genuine claimants will be scared off by this. But then I guess that’s one intended effect!

Cameron and co seem intent on taking us back to Victorian levels of deprivation!

Yes, I was wondering about that too. I think it’ll certainly put off a lot of grass roots agencies from assisting clients with claim forms. Which, of course, plays right into their hands.