Quote Originally Posted by lucy View Post
This was extensively investigated here in the last couple of months, because their had been some spectacular cases of fraud: 3% of all the people getting welfare did receive too much money or shouldn't have gotten any money at all.
Thanks for this information. However, something's missing.

3% of how many? And what proportion is that of the working population?

Furthermore, how much too much did they receive? A dollar or two, or hundreds? And how much of the overpayments was due to fraud as opposed to clerical error (working out benefits can be incredibly - and unnecessarily - complicated, even for the people who work in the welfare departments).

In Britain we have a population of 60 million (per National Statistics Office). Of those, we have a workforce of 30 million, of which 1.7 million are unemployed. 3% of that would mean 51,000 people were being paid too much unemployment benefit, for one reason or another - not all of it due to fraudulent claims.

11% of the UK population regard their health as "not good". Assuming that indicates that they make significant use of the NHS, then 6,600,000 are doing so. If 3% of these people were making fraudulent use of the NHS, we would be talking about 198,000 people.

We have, perhaps, 16 million people aged over 65, most of whom will be receiving benefits of some sort. Is pension fraud included in the 3% figure?

Britain's population is about 1/20th of that of USA, but however you look at it, 3% of a nation's economy produces numbers that can be scarily large. It is not proof that the nation is being dragged into financial ruin by people who refuse to contribute their fair share of work. The country can and should afford that in order to make sure the other 97% of benefits are paid out to people who do deserve it. Maybe it should work harder to eliminate the fraudsters.