Social Security Benefits: Fraud

(asked on 19th October 2021) - View Source

Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:

To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, what steps she is taking to protect people who are victims of identity theft and have had fraudulent benefit claims made in their name.


Answered by
David Rutley Portrait
David Rutley
Parliamentary Under-Secretary (Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office)
This question was answered on 28th October 2021

COVID-19 saw an unprecedented surge in Universal Credit claims, demanding an extraordinary response from DWP to ensure the welfare safety net continued to catch all those in urgent need.

Whilst a small number of people deliberately misrepresented their circumstances or looked to exploit our response to the pandemic, the verification of claimants’ identities remains at the core of our checks and we quickly introduced new and robust verification procedures following initial easements. Face to face interviews are now being re-established, subject to the latest COVID-19 advice.

Where fraud does occur, the Department takes the issue extremely seriously. Our Integrated Risk and Intelligence Service coordinates the detection of, and response to, fraud risks from organised crime groups, detecting and shutting down systematic attacks. Last year, this led us to suspend 152,000 Universal Credit claims and prevented £1.9 billion in benefits from being paid to people trying to scam the system.

Identity fraud is a complex issue, and it is not always possible to be definitive about every case, but our Enhanced Checking Service and our Serious Organised Crime teams disrupted or corrected over 298,000 claims (including the 152,000 mentioned above) in 2020-21.

We are not able to describe the robust processes we have in place, as to do so may compromise the effectiveness of our operations. However, DWP continues to work across Government to address this issue.

Where citizens allege that their identity has been used to make a fraudulent claim for Universal Credit, DWP considers each case on its own merits. Decisions are made on the strength of the evidence provided. If a claimant has been the victim of a scam, and has not benefited from it in any way, they will not be held liable for any debt. In these cases, we will seek to recover any losses from the perpetrator of any fraud.

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