Meanwhile the Banksters giggle into their champagne flutes.

How much was the State charged for cutting your wisteria, Mr Cameron? Nicky Clarke would have charged less, including orange highlights.

They don't like it when it's up `em.

How are these fraud figures calulated?

It's fraud. Pieces of paper have been signed in order to obtain fund that someone isn't entitled to. These get measured on the figures as money paid out, there's an audit trail for them.

How are they able to measure how many of these claims are fraudulent?

Absolute and complete politics. This is nothing about stopping the rot but instead of appealing to Daily Mail readers! Start with politicians and their fiddled expenses and apply much higher sanctions, then get the banker's money back (with pre-crash interest), then tax evaders (going after the big sharks first) and then when you have all this sorted out go for the benefit "scroungers".

Meanwhile, Cameron's jail building and private company mates (sorry alumni) will doubtlessly be overjoyed at the prospect of the taxpayer stumping up several billion more for new prisons to house all those "benefit cheating scum". "Build prisons not schools" should be the new slogan of the coalition.

David Cameron will today announce his "uncompromising" clampdown on benefit fraud, just a pity he doesn't announce an uncomprimising clampdown on the fraudsters fiddling taxes, etc, which costs the taxpayer more than the cost of benefit fraud. There again he couldn't do that because he would be hitting some of his high flying friends and relations in the pocket.

No Davy stick to victimising the poor, that's what your best at and when this country wakes up to your nasty tactics you can always blame the LibDem scapegoats.

After the Westminster expenses scandals, Cameron and his ilk seem like the last people in a position to point the finger at anyone else in terms of being somewhat ' bent ' on a financial footing. Cameron's overseas antics have revealed a very limited individual indeed, all gloss kind of sums it up.
Fools Delboy phraseology was never more appropriate........what a plonker!

Be a good chap and pay back your state subsidised second mortgage.

Oh, we only despise poor, already disenfranchised scroungers..

snpjones

There is no `poor', in the UK. It is convenient for the wrist dragging left to suggest that there is, in the same way that there still (goodness) a working class.

How silly.

money is being stolen from the taxpayer. This is simply not acceptable.

Except when it was paying your mortgage eh Davey boy?

And the estimated £15 billion lost to tax evasion?

We've had the fourth sector. Now it's sponge avengers/snooper force.

National spare-room data base next. Wish life wouldn't imitate art quite so much.

I don't know how to express what I feel in words, so uuurrrrhhhhg will have to suffice.

A cynic might suggest this is just a ploy to cut down on all benefit claims, including legitimate ones, so they can pass the saving off on those that are well off.

5.2 billion...that's around 20% of the annual unpaid VAT isn't it?

Cats Dave, cats. Go get 'em Dave. See 'em off. See 'em off. Good boy, good boy!

Burgua205

There is no `poor', in the UK.

What an utterly preposterous statement. Ever been homeless, so without an address you can't claim regular benefits Burgua? Know anyone who has?

Thought not.

But on a brighter note with these coalition policies there's going to be plenty more in that situation so you're chances of learning of their plight will be greatly increased.

I still don't see any evidence of the "we're all in this together" fluff Mr. Cameron spoke of during the election campaign. It's just one assault on the poorest after another.

Pure hot air.

The way the coalition reveal their wish list is like an advertising campaign.

Hopefully, it's not leading up to a political coup in October with the spending review.

Nasty kids sounding off.

And the tax fraudsters, and the cash only merchants? Raid the golf clubs and the builders yards now!

Benefit fraud is 624 times more serious than tax evasion

The tax gap from evasion is, give or take the odd billion or so, £70 billion at present. The total tax gap is about £120 billion.

Benefit fraud and official error combined cost £3.1 billion last year.

But apparently benefit cheating is times more important than tax abuse. How do I know? Because of this exchange of parliamentary questions and answers from Hansard:

Tax Evasion: Publicity

Katy Clark: To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer how much HM Revenue and Customs has spent on advertising for the purposes of preventing tax evasion in each of the last three years. [3776]

Mr Gauke: HM Revenue and Customs spent £633,284 (excluding VAT) on advertising for the purposes of preventing tax evasion last year. There was no expenditure in the previous two years.

And:

Katy Clark: To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions how much his Department budgeted for advertising tackling benefit fraud in each of the last three financial years. [1035]

Chris Grayling: The information is in the table:

Budgeted expenditure for advertising tackling benefit fraud

2007-08 £6.5 million

2008-09 £6.0 million

2009-10 £5.0 million

Note: Includes media costs, PR, production and research costs. It excludes VAT.

We are currently reviewing all advertising expenditure and requests for further funding will be submitted to HM Treasury for approval.

So over three years tackling tax evasion was worth just £633,000 but benefit fraud was worth £17.5 million.

So apparently, prima facie benefit fraud is 27.6 times more important than tax evasion over this period.

But weight the spend by the size of the problem and the ratio is even more spectacular. Then benefit fraud is 624 times more important than tax evasion.

Which is indicative of a spectacular error of judgement.

http://www.taxresearch.org.uk/Blog/2010/07/01/benefit-fraud-is-624-times-more-serious-than-tax-evasion/

Fraud is only a fraction of the amount not given or claimed in underpayments. How about going after the real crooks like the bankers and politicians?

Cameron can rot in hell. He's never been on benefits - he has no idea what it's like. It's a mark of the inherent decency that benefit fraud is as low as it is. If you claim benefit, you're constantly treated like untrustworthy scum. Is it any wonder some people buy into the dehumanisation and fiddle the figures a little.

Big fraud is one thing. But most benefit fraud is small and done because of real need. And the amount of fraud is much less than the amount underpaid because of errors.

Cameron can talk about the need to crack down on benefit fraud when tax fraudsters are regularly sentenced to twenty to life. Until then, the less we hear from him the better.

Cameron Direct roadshows

Wow cool, do they have hot young conservative girls in wet T-shirts giving out balloons tempting us into the big soceity?

Is Mike Read the compare?

Nah I know there are no hot young Conservative girls...it was all mere fancy Fion, a hopeless dream.

more money is saved from entitled people not claiming than is lost from fraud....but you'l never here about that....maybe this newspaper can start doing some proper reporting on the subject....

As several people have said the energy Cameron expends acting tough on benefit cheats is somewhat sickening given the amount of tax evasion and tax avoidance we have in this country. Look at this shiny image to see just how much the difference is: http://www.leftfootforward.org/images/2010/08/Welfare-and-tax-gap1.jpg. I only wish I could say that Labour politicians have been less immoral and cowardly in their pronouncements.

your average fraudulent benefit claimant - makes maybe fifty quid a week on the side?

your average tax evader? in the thousands? the tens of thousands?

dave, let's talk tax fraud.

Why do people seem to be defending benefit fraud? And yes the banks etc are pricks, but why does that seem to make benefit fraud right? Surely it puts genuine claimants at risk.

If you're not entitled to benefits, you shouldn't get them and you should be prosecuted if you falsely claim them. There would probably be money available to raise the benfits for those on genuine need if all the thieves who claim falsely were prevented from doing so.

FionDearg

Wrong again.

You do not have to have a permanent home i n order to claim benefits.

You made that up.

People who blow their benefits on booze and fags do not deserve to have any benefits especially if they are fit enough to work.

No sympathy for them at all.

They could gain more from recuperating the money lost through tax evasion and they know it. They just don't want to. They think the poor are voiceless but they will find this time round it's not so.

http://citywire.co.uk/new-model-adviser/tax-evasion-costs-treasury-15-times-more-than-benefit-fraud/a378274

Of course we must clamp down hard on benefit fraudsters...benefit cheats...cheats against the rest of us...
But that is not really the plastic-clown Cameron's motive for this latest utterance...
With Cameron, it is just one desperate sound-bite after another.
This issue is too serious to be so shodily cheapened.

fred2006
10 Aug 2010, 12:57AM

your average fraudulent benefit claimant - makes maybe fifty quid a week on the side?

Quite right.

And this rare beast donates this £50, along with his giro, to capitalists and the tax man.

It wasn't so long ago banks' tax avoidance was in the headlines, 1bn by Barclays alone. http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/article5908523.ece

I'm no fan of benefit fraud, but deal with the big villains first.

This is a job for Lord Conrad Black (fraud) and Lord Ashcroft (tactical evasion, allegedly) - insider knowledge is always useful.

I couldn't agree more, Bthel.

Honourable Prime minister David Cameron is the holy grail of tax payers

But we will not shrug our shoulders and let them get away with it any longer.

Open up your copies of the Ragged Trousered Philanthropists and observe that the Tories really have not changed in rhetoric since 1910. David Cameron indulged in invectives against foreign workers and indolent underclasses throughout the televised debates and shows nothing more now that he's in power than this irresponsible disregard for those who've been hit by a crises not of their making.

Oh, and if the Tories would take the trouble to learn some basic economics, they might hear of something called 'the multiplier effect'. As Northred suggests the tax gap from evasion far exceeds benefit fraud and even if some benefit queens are out there commiting fraud, all that money stays in the local economy, which, when private sector business is not at its most dynamic, is not a bad thing.

It is incredible that after hundreds of years we are still letting them get away with playing on prejudices against the jobless. The right-wing politics of envy is funny thing.

Now let's just stand back a second and look at what is happening.

Long term unemployed curently stands at around 800,000.
Current job vacancies around 480,000
Total number claiming jobless benefits according to the government 5.2 million

Added to the job market by government policies:

Single mothers who will be expected to return to work earlier
Young people who haven't got a place in education due to cuts
Pensioners who no longer have to retire
600,000 public sector workers laid off
700,000 private sector workers laid off
People being moved off invalidity benefits on to JSA
1.2 million working part time or short time who will take up any slack long before any jobs become available in their companies

Government cutting housing benefit by linking it to CPI, moving the maximum payable from the 50% to 30% of local rents
The long term unemployed, at the highest lever for nearly 15 years and growing rapidly, will be expected to find 10% of their rent out of the £65/week JSA even if they have done everything possible to find a job.

Now it seems to me that government policies are going to have at least two fairly predictable effects.

1/ Those who follow the rules risk ending up on the street destitute because the benefits cuts are so savage as to make it almost impossible for anyone to survive on them. Already there are estimates that 750,000 could be added to the homeless figures, so Cameron will emulate Thatcher again in that we can pretty soon expect the cardboard boxes to reappear on our streets.

2/ More will break the rules becoming 'benefit cheats' and risk destitution and criminal sanctions.

3/ 22 miilionaires around the cabinet table will continue to suffer minimally as capital still attracts lower taxes than income

It a case of 'protect civil liberties', 'except when we don't want to'.

Just continuing Labour's job really - these changes to credit files to show monthly payments to credit cards (and not just balances), existence of bank accounts, balances of overdrafts, and monthly payments to 'credit' account like mobile phones were brought in by Labour under the banner: "We are doing this to promote responsible lending" and before leaving power, they had already initiated the 'Experian' trial that Cameron is now expanding, using data collected for an entirely different purpose.

Of course, nobody has a right to opt out of providing their data to Experian, which is as much a creeping big brother database as identity cards were ever going to be. Experian/Equifax house data collected and provided by financial institutions, that was only ever meant to be available to other financial institutions to judge an applicant's suitability for credit - oh how Labour widened the net, and adding to the small print. Is Housing Benefit now a 'credit application'? Really?

The trouble is not when they catch fraudsters, but the invasive scrutiny that the vast majority of honest claimants will be put through - a bit like trawling through the credit files and bank accounts of everyone on the street just because Fred at no.52 had been caught fiddling his taxes: imagine the outcry from the middle classes.

Ah, but tis the poor, the poor. Asked to justify how credit bills are being covered when the payments on credit records don't match the bank accounts they trawl. And it's more complex than they make it sound - the files won't show that the £200 cash advance that was used to make the £200 monthly payment (so called in for questioning); and there is nothing in housing benefit rules that prevents a third party (say a parent) covering payments on a pre-existing credit-card debt during a period when their son or daughter falls on hard times; and from April 2010 maintenance payments for children were wholly excluded from the housing benefit calculation, that's a nice little loophole for legitimizing fraudulent income

where you have people, you will have fraud... where you have a Conservative politician, you will always have this ridiculous posturing to right-wing media...

it will make very little difference to the levels of frauds, but like the 'war on terror', it will reassure the masses that Government has role to play in looking after YOU!, in an era when government has few big ideas to justify its usefulness to society.

And just because they are going after benefit cheats, does not mean that they are letting people away with tax avoidance. Gee....can't they do both?

I would suspect that there will be a lot of tax loopholds closed in the very near future to prevent increased cases of tax avoidance. they'll have to do something as they look for more avenues to pay back this debt.

This vile disgraceful cabal, who have taken a big chunk of pie, the best cream and togetther with Labour and Libdems, have decided it, is okay for them to milk the system, etc, etc.

How low will they sink? Will they execute people, for trying to put food on their table's, or buying a few gifts?

While the banks, dawn traders, short sellers, make billions, the old, sick, vulnerable, Well, all humans that are honest, ill, or in a job, will be discriminated against and persectuted.

A fair ethical society that provides, without question, for the old, sick, poor, disables vulnerable is a caring society. We have a far right, fascist/marxist/nazi coalition, that wants to crush everyone.

If you're doing okay, and think!; this will not affect me? think again! it will.

As the poor stop spending, tesco will crash, and every other business will follow. Everyone in the gutter, dead, or dying form homeless starvation.

And this hypocrite has a rather interesting history with mortgages and second homes, and thought that parliamentary business included having his wisteria cut under parliamentary expenses.

If there was any justice in britain, he would be in jail rather than pontificating about people fiddling benefits to avoid starving.

That's it Dave, give the lowly scum a good kicking....

No doubt you're readying a radical raft of measures to clamp down on tax evasion, which costs the exchequer twice as much in lost revenue?

What's that Dave, "not a priority" you say?

Well then surely you're proposing a Royal Commission into what went wrong in the City, creating this mess in the first place?

What, not interested in that either?

So the global financial crisis was all down to a bloated public sector, fraudulent dole scum, and Gordon's bad management?

You lot are so transparent it beggars belief.

Burgua

People who blow their benefits on booze and fags...

Would be dead in a month through malnutrition...so the unemployed aren't allowed any little luxuries are they not? Let them sit in sackcloth amongst the ashes of their hopes and lives, waiting in silence for the tasteless gruel so grudgingly lavished upon them by the likes of you eh?

No sympathy for them at all.

There's a psychiatric definition of this kind of severe lack of empathy for your fellow man, I believe it's 'sociopath'.

Who is the bigger scrounger, a single mother who does not inform HMRC that she is in a relationship who then has someone chipping in with the shopping occasionally, or someone with a £15 million fortune who insists the taxpayer pay the mortgage on their rather luxurious home?

Benefit "cheats" are poor. OK they manipulate the system to get themselves and their families a little bit extra. A little bit extra to supplement their little. If you are wealthy you can employ a wealthy tax accountant (a sponger if ever there was one) for a lot to help you gain a lot when you don't really need it. This man, Cameron, makes me very angry.

Can't he just be honest and say this Government will machine-gun anyone who tries to claim benefit. This new "tough stance" isn't likely to dissuade those who really are in need, but will force those who are still only slightly terminally ill to think again about whether they really need to make a claim and become feckless leeches draining the lifeblood of the poor honest, decent working man and his wife.
Send them back to their own country thats what I say.

This is not about benefit fraud. It's about whipping up bigotry and hatred against people, those who will be the chief victims of the coalition's policies, those who will lose their jobs and will be unable to find adequate replacements, and those who are already unemployed and on benefits. Dr Goebbels said that the essence of good propaganda is not to convert anyone to your opinion, it is merely about reinforcing what's already there, the latent bigotries and prejudices of a society. The ConDemolition understands this very well.

Excellent post lamagia. The surveiilance state will still very much apply to the poor.