Investigator Seeks Position

Mike Neuman from ITS-Training writes:

Have you read the consultation on the future of Housing Benefit?  If you are currently a Fraud Investigator and you haven’t might I suggest that you get a copy right now?  Why the urgency?  Have a look at points 4.13 to 4.16 :

We propose to build on the example of the tax credit system and introduce a system of fixed period awards for Housing Benefit customers which will fix the award of benefit for six months.

A six month fixed period award would strike the right balance between removing the need to report minor fluctuations in circumstances whilst recognising that major changes will occur over time that need to be reflected in the benefit award. The changes that would need to be reported would be subject to detailed design consideration. This would mark a radical change to current Housing Benefit rules which require changes to be reported as soon as they occur. Awards would run for fixed periods but could be renewed as long as the customer continued to satisfy the eligibility rules.

For those in work, benefit awards could be fixed for six months. This could mean that Housing Benefit would be a fixed weekly award that would be unaffected by changes in circumstances including changes in income and earnings. At the end of the six months, the local authority would reassess the claim based on current circumstances. This would not necessarily require a new benefit claim or filling out lengthy forms: lessons learned from ‘rapid reclaim’—a streamlined reclaiming process—could be adopted to allow for a fast and straightforward benefit re‑assessment.

Another option would be to fix the earnings element only of the Housing Benefit calculation for a fixed period. In this way, other changes in circumstances would still need to be reported, and processed, in the usual way but changes in earnings would not need to be reported until the end of the fixed period.

Now call me Mr Suspicious, but that looks to me like one of the most cynical ‘fraud prevention measures’ in quite some time.  Let’s be clear :  a large amount of HB fraud is committed by people who have changes in their circumstances that they ‘don’t get around to reporting’ to the authorities.  An equally large segment of fraud is concerned with the ‘shadow economy’, so there are no records to prove the offence.

Those people who are brought to book are caught out by investigators who work damn hard to prove that the person has had a change in their circumstances that has not been reported.  

If this provision goes into place, it could prove almost impossible to establish that fraud has taken place.  Unless an investigation happens to span an award date (and there’s a fairly small chance of that happening) or lead to some documentary evidence, then there’s a fair chance of there being no provable offence.

So the government will be able to spend more on HB, whilst claiming that fraud rates are down.  And how long before that leads to a reduction in the number of investigators in post?  Oh dear…

Still it’s not all bad :  there’s a campaign running to ‘shop’ those who misuse social housing.  Anyone in the housing department hiring?