Comment by muse900 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by muse900 | Hacker News Reader

I lived in London for several years.

I've met people that were very open about scamming the system.

I once knew a person, that went to London 17 years ago from another Country. He managed to get a not fit for work benefit and housing. His later then 'wife', they never got married but have a child together and live together, got some illness. Never met her, he was saying that was a genuine illness and not like his and she can't work.

So that person that I mentioned above, owned a car and a motorbike. Not sure if those items were under his name or not. He also worked at a car mechanic shop for money under the table.

In the 4 years I knew him, he was never caught, nor anyone went to his supposed house to check if he is there or what he is doing.

That guy was literally skimming the system for money without any control. At some point he and his 'wife' found out about another scam that they could run, if she gets evicted by her landlord (both of them were getting housing benefits, but they were presenting that they were staying at 2 different properties while he was staying at her house) she could somehow get a free house. So they decided to bring a dog home so that the landlord sends them out. They got send out. She was put into a b&b with her daughter for a few months, while he was staying at the other house the benefits was paying for and then I've no idea if the scam worked or not.

To be very and completely honest, I did look into how I can report that guy, just because I didn't find it fair, that I am paying taxes and there are people like this person on the article that really need the money, and you get those people that just scam the system. All I got from googling how to report someone, was that the reporting system sucks so much that the HMRC won't really do much about it.

That sort story is just there to show you whats wrong with the system in general.

Absolutely, I've lost friends over this very point - cheating the benefits systems makes me just as angry as people who don't pay their taxes. But which one is actually the biggest problem for the country?

"Benefits fraud costs the government £1.3bn a year, according to official statistics, while the gap between tax owed and tax paid is put at £34bn a year by officials."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/13/benefit-or-t...

I think people are social animals who often find it easier to understand a concrete thing like a "no-goodnik thief" as opposed to a MNC with complex possibly legal? or not? tax loophole abusing ability

I've come to thinking: there's no method which makes the system fairly accessible to all those who need support, which also doesn't allow for some level of exploitation by bad actors. As the level of fraud is reduced to zero by tests and policies, more deserved beneficiaries of the system are shut out.

I actually still get a bit more upset over benefit fraud than tax fraud, as (disclaimer) my family are beneficiaries due to my brothers autism - the hours and stress required to successfully navigate the system cannot be underestimated. Most recipients of disability payments etc will tell you it is a full-time job. The moral failure of benefit fraud is paid for twice - once materially by the taxpayer, again spiritually by the recipient. For me, another argument for the qualitative moral and social components of education - which seems to have been stripped away of late... A rant for another time!

> I've come to thinking: there's no method which makes the system fairly accessible to all those who need support, which also doesn't allow for some level of exploitation by bad actors.

Basic income for everyone would be one way, but that brings its own set of issues and challenges with it

Yes, I have also known one person to be avoid taxes, which IMHO is just as bad as claiming. The thing about tax avoidance is it's possible to be 'respectable' and still get away with it - 'my accountant deals with all that stuff...'. Actually claiming benefits generally provokes a social stigma, and the amount of money involved is far less.

I agree we need to concentrate more on tax avoidance. Particularly since any welfare state is going to be abused by a minority of some people - that is not a good reason to create a totally ineffective welfare state - that is part of the price we pay for it unfortunately.

Or as in the case of the current elected president of the United States, not paying taxes is "smart". The hypocrisy of worrying about someone "stealing" maybe £30k a year in benefits in order to support a very average (lower middle class) lifestyle vs those who avoid millions in tax when already wealthier than the vast majority of the country is insane.

Conversely I know a number of people who are not realistically able to work in the normal economy due to disabilities who have had their benefits cut to life-threatening levels. It's not unusual for these decisions to be reversed on appeal but then you have to find a way to stay alive for months while representing yourself legally.

It seems to me that the crackdowns make the system worse. As it becomes more bureaucratic the people who know exactly how to lie can still scam it but the genuinely needy don't know the magic words and get shut out.

There's been plenty of effort spent into estimates of benefits fraud, and by all account it is a tiny problem. Yes, it should be dealt with. But currently, the problems universal credit and other defects of the benefits reforms are causing are outright killing people.

Benefit fraud is currently far down the priority list of things that needs to be fixed, and that even goes for cost: The government has pushed things so far that you can look forward to a lot of tax money going to cover legal costs as a result of the huge and growing number of lawsuits the government is losing.

The government is complicit in far worse breaches of legislation related to the benefits system than fraudulent claimants are.

> The government is complicit in far worse breaches of legislation related to the benefits system than fraudulent claimants are.

Good point. The use of retroactive legislation to deny people the money that a court ruled they were entitled to was a stain on the British constitution. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/15/dwp-law-chan...

Luckily that was challenged, and overturned, and they've said they're not appealing it.

Here's the judgement. It's worth reading, because it seems the lack of consultation for a major change was one of the reasons to overturn it.

http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/...

Ah, you're right but I think that's the wrong reference, it's talking about PIP. I'm thinking of https://ukhumanrightsblog.com/2014/07/08/retrospective-legis...

(this of course goes on the list of reasons why the government wants to get out of ECHR at any cost, since it's the only constitutional brake in the system)

The official method for estimating fraud rates is take a very small sample of claims, review the paper work and conduct an interview. of course this is never going to catch the majority of fraud!

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

If the sample is randomly chosen shouldn't it have proportionally as much fraud as the overall system?

I think the suggestion is that they'd be unable to detect it in many cases. And that's a fair point - of course some portion of fraudulent claimants will succeed in hiding it. I just don't think it's likely to be a sufficient portion to make much difference.

Of course they'll never be perfect, but the official estimate would need to be off by at least an order of magnitude for it to matter vs. the harm done by government.

If it's that far off, there's at least half a dozen editors of major UK papers that'd be rubbing their hands in glee at the opportunity to further demonize benefits claimants by exposing more benefits cheats and/or by exposing flaws in the reporting. That this isn't happening despite both commercial and ideological gain to be had in doing it if they could, is to me a strong indication that the numbers aren't that far off.

The implied suggestion in your post is that we should accept people going through the situation that the man in the article went through in order to make it harder for criminals to commit benefits fraud. That is, quite frankly, an utterly inhumane reaction to the problem. Innocent people in dire situations are far more important than protecting a (relatively small) amount of money being paid out to criminals.

We do need to try and catch criminals where possible, but if the cost of catching them is innocent people suffering then we should do less to catch them and just accept the cost instead.

The sad reality is that clamping down of the sort they've done (eg sanctions for missing a single jobseeker's meeting) seem far more likely to punish those unfamiliar with the system than those who have made a habit of abusing it. When you're a professional benefits abuser, you have time to learn the intricacies of the system you're gaming.

My own personal anecdata: I recently relocated to the UK with my wife. An acquaintance of hers - who is also a fairly blatant benefits abuser - essentially told her that when she got to the UK she would explain all about how to game the system and that my wife would never need to work again.

She obviously didn't realise that as a non-UK citizen here on settlement visa I am not entitled to benefits, and my wife can't claim benefits if I hope to renew my visa. Further, it didn't even occur to her that we wouldn't want to claim benefits unnecessarily even if we could.

Many parts of that personal anecdote sound fishy and biased to me. He "managed to" sounds like some kind of fraud, but no evidence is given. His wife is put into scare quotes, but it seems they were living in a personal union - where I live, this is equivalent of being married, but maybe in the UK it's different. Is it illegal in the UK to own a car or a motorbike when you're not fit for work and get benefits because of it? You sound as if it is, but that seems implausible to me.

The list goes on and on. Maybe this particular guy is skimming the system, but even then he's probably skimming it way less than the many people who evade taxes with offshore accounts, etc. The priorities are quite dubious, because statistics show unambiguously that more and more money and resources flow to less and less people - it's fairly drastic, if you look at the data.

What's wrong with most systems is that they are patronizing recipients of benefits and try to force them into extreme low wage labor (often to falsify unemployment statistics), while the gap between rich and poor is continually increasing at a higher and higher rate. Instead, society should give the lowest income classes some better perspectives, improve their working conditions and overall social power. For example, with a basic income system, but there may be less drastic improvements. Then they can also buy more useless stuff that breaks after two years, which is what everybody wants, right?

> He "managed to" sounds like some kind of fraud, but no evidence is given.

Well, GP did mention that he worked at a car shop while on a not-fit-for-work benefit plan.

Or you know, you could just get mugged by someone homeless with nothing to lose who is also getting recruited by gangs who use these people as fodder.

In all seriousness, if you have not the slightest ounce of human sympathy to those who don't skim and are decent folk, rational self management has a strong enough argument and evidence to support such behavior.

The reason advanced societies pay this price is because the alternative is right there in front of you in the developing world.

The disenfranchised don't go away. They are human beings, who happen to be pretty efficient at coming up with average solutions to the problems they face.

Even if that solution is directly through you and to your wallet.

I have similar stories about acquaintance IT contractors using offshore tax schemes. Are they better or worse?

These anecdotes about complex systems only fuel peoples preconceived perceptions of systems that they fear benefit others more than them.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com