It was three weeks after Christmas when the bombshell letter arrived. Guy Shahar and his wife, Oksana, looked at each other in stunned disbelief.
They had followed the Guardian’s investigation into the carer’s allowance scandal that has left thousands of families with crippling debts and criminal records. Not once did they think they would join them.
“Important,” it read in big bold type. “You have been paid more carer’s allowance than you are entitled to. You now need to pay this money back”.
In some weeks, she was paid just 38p more than the threshold – but for that tiny infraction she is being forced to repay £64.60 each time, the rate of carer’s allowance at the time.
Sounds extremely, extremely stupid. A breach of 1p should trigger repayment of 1p.
Also, a person should be notified at once, at the latest next month.
Also, why does the system even allow people to claim more than they are entitled? Is there no maximum set into the payment field or whatever they have for it?
If it’s anything like unemployment insurance claims, you could possibly be entitled to different amounts every week depending on whether you made income. But it’s odd that it lets you get more than the max.
In my experience, it’s either total incompetence of the people in charge, or it’s malicious in order to “catch” people doing something bad.
Like a bait car, but way more malicious since the person getting in the metaphorical car doesn’t even know it’s not their car because the keys worked, and nobody bothers stopping them for a few days so they get extra criminal charges.
If the punishment for deliberately claiming more in benefits than you’re entitled to is simply to repay the benefits then there’s no incentive to not do it. If you get caught then you’re no worse off than if you’d not broken the law so why not do it?
Having said that, if the punishment for accidentally claiming more than you’re entitled to is so harsh then that is unfair.
I’d imagine that the process for both of the scenarios is the same but it definitely should have some human element in it where intent is taken into account.
The system should protect people from that by having proper checks before the money is paid out.
I’m not a lawyer or barrister, but there are already laws against fraud, which is what you are describing. There’s a huge difference between deliberately over claiming and making a mistake, and what the article is describing is at worst honest mistakes.
Uh, what? The incentive is not having to pay anything back by claiming the correct amount. They’re poor, that’s why they’ve applied for the benefit in the first place. They can’t afford to pay stuff back.
The reason this is punitive is literally because they’ve chosen the amount they’re able to manage and yet are hit with huge fines when they’ve “gotten it wrong” by small margins, some as low as 38p like in the article.
Unless your rich and break the law then the fine you a small amount relatively speaking and you made more by breaking the law.
A 7 million fine for stealing 1 billion in profits.
Just another day in late stage capitalism.
Of course someone usually has to go to jail for something so public, so Steve from accounting is getting his “jailbird bonus” and will be admitting to fraud, and spend 4 months in a
hotelcushioned cell. He also gets weekends off.