Ministers have tried to highlight the impact of benefit fraud by publishing some of the more unusual excuses used by people found guilty of cheating. Reasons include carrying ladders as therapy rather than for cleaning windows, and claiming an identical twin had been doing work rather than them. About £1.6bn is lost through benefit and tax credit fraud each year. Some disability groups have warned the government against exaggerating the scale of the problem to justify cuts. Farm work One excuse revealed by the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) was: "I wasn't aware my wife was working because her hours of work coincided with the times I spent in the garden shed." Another false claimant said: "We don't live together, he just comes each morning to fill up his flask." In a case highlighted by the DWP, a man from Yorkshire claimed nearly £17,500 to look after his sick father - but had to admit to lying when his father revealed he had not seen his son for years. In another instance, a man claimed more than £55,000 in disability benefits while he was working on a dairy farm. Welfare Reform Minister Lord Freud said benefit fraud was serious, yet investigators were "routinely dealing with bare-faced cheek and ridiculous excuses for stealing money from the taxpayer". 'Negative impact' "It's bad for the system because it drives it into disrepute. We want to spend the money on people who genuinely need it," he said. "People stealing it for themselves means there is less money to go to where it is really needed to reduce poverty in this country." Lord Freud said the introduction of Universal Credit would simplify and automate the benefits system, and make it much easier to catch people who made false claims. But Richard Hawkes, chief executive of disability charity Scope, said: "The government really has to stop over-simplifying the debate on welfare and using unusual fraud cases to support changes which could have a serious and negative impact on the lives of hundreds of thousands of disabled people. "We'd like to see the government put as much effort in to finding disabled people long-term sustainable employment." Source:- http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-13587434
My best friend for many years claimed for his partner, who was not in fact living with him for 8 months of every year, she was in fact working in her fathers business, a newsagents in a small town on the Clyde, for that period each year. They were engaged for something like 13 years but eventually she left him as she could see the relationship was going nowhere. He got away with it, he's dead now, died aged 49, he stopped claiming for her after about 10 or 12 years that would have been sometime in the mid 90's but it was after that time that he started to go downhill because it actually isn't that easy to get by on benefits, it tends to shorten your life. Don't get me wrong my pal was a lazy intellectual snobbish git, who was given good chances in life from all and sundry, me included, I tried to get him into IT even going so far as to supply him with a computer and provide him with training on various database systems and programming languages, but all to no avail. Anyway in the end, the last few years he actually was disabled, the reason was simply that he had deteriorated over the years so much because of poor nutrition and a lifetime of smoking (mostly rolling tobacco) that he succumbed eventually to pneumonia in 2007, a sad and lonely end for a very very intelligent but misguided man. Benefit fraud exists but like pensions living on benefits is a hard hard life it's no surprise that some people cheat and get away with it.
Sorry Peter I missed that this was in the Humour section, I tend to read the "New Posts" and respond accordingly I don't always check the section Some of the excuses are funny but it's not hard to imagine someone coming out with them
