Doing the Maths

I’m quite amazed by the scale of the scam in this story, about a couple who claimed benefits for no less than sixteen children – all while living in what’s described as a “one-room property”. I don’t know if that means ‘one bedroom’ or was just a unit in a hostel, or somesuch, but either way it’s awesome to be claiming to have eighteen people living in that property.

After all, I assume that they were also claiming some kind of housing benefit for living in that property – so any decent piece of joined-up work would enable the Tax Credits people, or the Benefits Agency (or whatever the hell it’s called this week) to possibly think that the claim might be just a weeny bit fraudulent.

How were they able to claim for so many children? Because the Tax Credits Agency doesn’t (or, one hopes, didn’t) require parents to provide a birth certificate as proof that the children existed.

It’s the final paragraph of the story that drives me crackers, though.

After the case Sarah Bamford, of HM Revenue and Customs, said: “This case is the result of many months of intense and thorough work by a dedicated team of tax credit investigation officers, determined to see that these fraudsters were brought to justice.”

© BBC News website 2008

If the system had been in place initially, there’d have been no sodding need for the investigation, because they wouldn’t have been able to make such a massive fraudulent claim at all. Fucking jobsworth self-serving HMRC doublespeak dickwads.