Over ?3billion overpaid in benefits

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Over ?3billion overpaid in benefits because of fraud and error, official report finds
More than ?3 billion was overpaid to benefits claimants because of mistakes and fraud last year, an official Parliamentary report has found.

The figures, for 2009/10, showed the problem had not improved for years, costing the taxpayer huge amounts of money, said the Public Accounts Committee.
Margaret Hodge MP, the committee?s chairman, said the Department for Work and Pensions had ?to get its house in order?.
Mrs Hodge - a former Labour minister in the same department - said ministers could not wait until 2013, when a new benefits system is introduced, to deal with these problems.
The report found that ?3.1 billion in benefits was overpaid because of fraud and errors by staff and claimants. In the same year, ?1.3 billion was underpaid.
The value of the errors as a proportion of total benefit spending of ?148 billion was low, but still involved ?very significant? sums of public money, the MPs said.
The committee said the department was making little attempt to ?identify the reasons why staff make mistakes and where guidance and training should be directed as a result?.
Fraud and error in the benefits system had meant that Government auditors had had to ?qualify? the department?s accounts for the past 22 years.
Mrs Hodge, who was a minister in the department between 2005 and 2006, said: ?What concerns us is that the department still lacks a clear plan of action, including a way of measuring progress.?
Conservative MP and committee member Richard Bacon said mistakes over benefit payments was ?one of the most intractable and expensive problems in Whitehall.
?Not only are these losses roughly the same as the year before, but the cost of error in the benefits system has changed little over the last four years.?
He added: ?The DWP lacks a clear, decisive plan to achieve its joint target of a 25 per cent cut in the cost of overpayments by 2015.
?It has been 22 years since the department?s accounts last received a clean bill of health. The department must do better as we simply cannot afford another year of the DWP?s inertia.?
A department spokesman: ?Our welfare reforms will simplify the benefits system making it easier to understand and less open to mistakes.
?We are absolutely committed to reducing fraud and error, and our new strategy sets out our plans to tackle this problem.?

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Govt does not want to admit, they paid all that to asylums seekers in the last five years just bluffing to say it may be a fraud, how could that happen they have all the record another fak*** blunder.

[Canker_Canison]

?What concerns us is that the department still lacks a clear plan of action, including a way of measuring progress.?

Why does this not surprise me, a government run department not being able to work out how to solve a problem.
I'm willing to put money on the first proposed solution includes setting up a new department with 6 managers & a stupid amount of money needed to fund the research into finding a solution.