Verification of informaton provided by housing benefit applicants about their employment
Dear Birmingham City Council,
Verification of information about the claimant’s income from employment and self-employment?
Dear Dudley MBC
Setting the scene
The eligibility for Housing Benefit (HB) depends on several factors including income, capital, and the circumstances of the claimant (for example who lives at the property with the claimant i.e. partner, relatives and loggers), the size of household, and age.
HB Fraud and error can arise in different ways. Fraud due to claimants can occur when claimants deliberately have provided false or inaccurate information about their circumstances or failed to report a change in their circumstances to maximise their benefit entitlement
My request will focus only on whether you have control systems in place to prevent, identify and detect HB overpayments due to claimants’ fraud and when the claim is made initially, and subsequently after the benefit has been awarded.
According to the National Audit Office “The Department and local authorities manage HB. The Department sets policy, entitlement rules and shares data and guidance with local authorities. Local authorities have a statutory duty to undertake the day-to-day administration of Housing Benefit and pay claimants” (The NAO, 2014).
However, it is not clear whether the local authority or the DWP is responsible for having control systems/ procedures in place to prevent, identify and detect housing benefit fraud. And whether any of them has any forms of systems/ procedures in place at all!!
In fact, a 2011 National Audit office report states that: “In our view, the Department has not established sufficiently clear responsibilities to tackle fraud and error in partnership with local authorities”. I believe this lack of clear responsibilities has created loopholes in the assessment of housing benefit which enabled many claimants to exploit the system to their advantage.
I would like to ask some questions about the verifications of information provided by the HB claimants which aim to test whether you verify some of the factors that affect the claimants’ eligibility to housing benefit.
Q1- How do verify the information that HB claimants provide about their employment status?
Q2- if HB claimants declare that they do not work for an employer and not self-employed, regardless of whether receiving benefits or waiting to hear about a claim, do you always verify their employment/self-employment status with HMRC?
Q3- If you do you verify their employment status based on the level of risk and other factors, out of the housing benefit applications processed by you in each of the last three financial years (or at least in one financial year), what is the percentage of the applicants that you verified their employment status with HMRC?
Yours faithfully,
Duncan Smith
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