Bag's Rants

A national disgrace.

I like the way they put this. Benefit fraud and mistakes are astronomical.

If you look at it as a percentage it is about 3%. I wonder how that relates to shops. I would imagine that their theft and error rate would be about the same. Big organisation, big inefficiencies and big losses.

Interesting that it doesn't go into how much we are saving because we make it difficult to claim, they just don't know it is available or we interrogate them so much they give up. Total costs would be much higher I would have thought. Read this.

There are more details here on the issues with the tax office. The sheriff of Nottingham part if you will.

Now bear in mind they are expecting us to invest billions in an ID card part of which is aimed at reducing fraud. This is fraught with difficulties and could very well being unworkable but we are going forward with this KGB style card regardless of practicalities.

What are they doing about ineptitude? You know, the other half of the waste and also partly the reason the fraud is undetected. They have probably spent hundreds of pounds on new memos telling the staff they should follow procedures. What is the point in that. By fixing this part of the problem they would undoubtedly reduce fraud as well.

Simplify it. Make it leaner, smarter and more efficient. We still might be paying £109B but at least we can reduce fraud and inefficiency and get the payments out on time and efficiently review changes.

Only Government can get away with ineptitude of this magnitude without some sort of censure.

posted by Bag @ 10:02 am