Quote:
Originally Posted by martyh
The fraudsters may not be the majority of claimants ,but they are a big enough minority to warrant tougher sanctions to stop them .If they are defrauding the DSS then it is highly likely that a large proportion of them are defrauding HMRC by working illegaly and not paying tax .If for example 100 people are taken off benefits because they are proven to be defrauding ,out of those 100 ,50 are working on the black market ,they will then have to go legit in their black market jobs (if possible) therefore paying tax and not taking benefit ,the remaining 50 from the original 100 will now have to find work to pay for the things that benefits used to,so there will in theory be 100 people not taking benefits but paying tax.
Probably a complicated way to explain it but i hope you take my meaning
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This is down to point of view.
The question is which is worse? denying someone benefit who needs it or letting more get away with fraud. To me the former is by far the worse scenario, because if someone doesnt get sickness benefit thats it they have nothing, if then no family or friends carry them they have no way to survive. Whilst the latter is simply just some lost money which is of course offset by underpaid benefits from people not claiming or not getting what they deserve. If draconian rules are in place legit people will be turned down or forced off, no question about it. We seem to be struggling to accept that there will always be fraud and as such its to be written off, the only way to get it down to 0 is to remove the ability to claim full stop. The media managed to get HB caps put in place but again when looking at the data the amount of people who were actually claiming silly HB was a very small fraction, confirmed by the DWP themselves. But the way it was reported made it seem like a widespread problem.
In short the strongest backs can bare the burden better.