"Benefits fraud costs the government £1.3bn a year, according to official statistics, while the gap between tax owed and tax paid is put at £34bn a year by officials."

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2016/apr/13/benefit-or-t...

I actually still get a bit more upset over benefit fraud than tax fraud, as (disclaimer) my family are beneficiaries due to my brothers autism - the hours and stress required to successfully navigate the system cannot be underestimated. Most recipients of disability payments etc will tell you it is a full-time job. The moral failure of benefit fraud is paid for twice - once materially by the taxpayer, again spiritually by the recipient. For me, another argument for the qualitative moral and social components of education - which seems to have been stripped away of late... A rant for another time!

Basic income for everyone would be one way, but that brings its own set of issues and challenges with it

I agree we need to concentrate more on tax avoidance. Particularly since any welfare state is going to be abused by a minority of some people - that is not a good reason to create a totally ineffective welfare state - that is part of the price we pay for it unfortunately.

It seems to me that the crackdowns make the system worse. As it becomes more bureaucratic the people who know exactly how to lie can still scam it but the genuinely needy don't know the magic words and get shut out.

Benefit fraud is currently far down the priority list of things that needs to be fixed, and that even goes for cost: The government has pushed things so far that you can look forward to a lot of tax money going to cover legal costs as a result of the huge and growing number of lawsuits the government is losing.

The government is complicit in far worse breaches of legislation related to the benefits system than fraudulent claimants are.

Good point. The use of retroactive legislation to deny people the money that a court ruled they were entitled to was a stain on the British constitution. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2013/mar/15/dwp-law-chan...

Here's the judgement. It's worth reading, because it seems the lack of consultation for a major change was one of the reasons to overturn it.

http://www.bailii.org/cgi-bin/format.cgi?doc=/ew/cases/EWHC/...

(this of course goes on the list of reasons why the government wants to get out of ECHR at any cost, since it's the only constitutional brake in the system)

https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachm...

If it's that far off, there's at least half a dozen editors of major UK papers that'd be rubbing their hands in glee at the opportunity to further demonize benefits claimants by exposing more benefits cheats and/or by exposing flaws in the reporting. That this isn't happening despite both commercial and ideological gain to be had in doing it if they could, is to me a strong indication that the numbers aren't that far off.

We do need to try and catch criminals where possible, but if the cost of catching them is innocent people suffering then we should do less to catch them and just accept the cost instead.

My own personal anecdata: I recently relocated to the UK with my wife. An acquaintance of hers - who is also a fairly blatant benefits abuser - essentially told her that when she got to the UK she would explain all about how to game the system and that my wife would never need to work again.

She obviously didn't realise that as a non-UK citizen here on settlement visa I am not entitled to benefits, and my wife can't claim benefits if I hope to renew my visa. Further, it didn't even occur to her that we wouldn't want to claim benefits unnecessarily even if we could.

The list goes on and on. Maybe this particular guy is skimming the system, but even then he's probably skimming it way less than the many people who evade taxes with offshore accounts, etc. The priorities are quite dubious, because statistics show unambiguously that more and more money and resources flow to less and less people - it's fairly drastic, if you look at the data.

What's wrong with most systems is that they are patronizing recipients of benefits and try to force them into extreme low wage labor (often to falsify unemployment statistics), while the gap between rich and poor is continually increasing at a higher and higher rate. Instead, society should give the lowest income classes some better perspectives, improve their working conditions and overall social power. For example, with a basic income system, but there may be less drastic improvements. Then they can also buy more useless stuff that breaks after two years, which is what everybody wants, right?

Well, GP did mention that he worked at a car shop while on a not-fit-for-work benefit plan.

In all seriousness, if you have not the slightest ounce of human sympathy to those who don't skim and are decent folk, rational self management has a strong enough argument and evidence to support such behavior.

The reason advanced societies pay this price is because the alternative is right there in front of you in the developing world.

The disenfranchised don't go away. They are human beings, who happen to be pretty efficient at coming up with average solutions to the problems they face.

Even if that solution is directly through you and to your wallet.

These anecdotes about complex systems only fuel peoples preconceived perceptions of systems that they fear benefit others more than them.