Going Corporate – with your Fraud Investigations

by Zac O’Neil of ITS Training

It’s Just A Jump To The Left…

Okay, it’s about time now that, if you haven’t already, you should be thinking about how you, as a benefit fraud investigator, can make sure that you’re still around in fraud when the DWP introduce the single investigation service (unless of course you’re thinking of career change).

So how are you going to do it?

The best way has to be to move into corporate investigations.  Now, whichever way you look at it, and we’ve looked at it from most, a corporate investigation team will be likely to save more money than it costs to run.  In other words, you’re going to be turning a profit here!  How irresistible a prospect is that for management?  For some far too resistible…but have you spelled it out and to the right people?

Anyway, you know that there’s corporate fraud and abuse out there, but at the same time you might be a little apprehensive about how to go about it.  The answer is easy as you like.  Corporate fraud and abuse is just like benefit fraud.  Almost exactly the same!  In the way that people do it and  the way you investigate it there’s no real difference.  Then there’re the areas in which it overlaps.

If you find out that someone isn’t living at their council house and they’re getting paid Housing or Council Tax Benefit, then that’s obviously benefit fraud.  But what about the other frauds that it might be?  Well, the question that needs to be asked is, who’s living there if not the claimant?  If they’re letting other people stay there then it’s housing fraud.  If they’re living in a another council house elsewhere then is housing fraud there as well.  And if they’ve moved in with another person then there’s another potential fraud.

What this means is that even now, though you’ve not lost benefit fraud investigation, you can be starting to show, as part of a normal benefit fraud investigation, how much more there is that is worthy of you looking at.  And we bet that if you were to simply concentrate on unlawful subletting and fraudulent homelessness for a while, you’d soon turn up some good cases to further ram the message home.

So, when else might there be other offences connected to benefit fraud?

The benefit claimant is an employee.  If this is the case and the claimant commits benefit fraud then there’s the knock on effect to their employment.  If it were an employee of the revenues dept then the effect is all the more serious which could result in disciplinary proceedings, and at worst, prosecution for abuse of position.

How about if the claimant said that they were living alone but were not.  Whether it were living together fraud or an undeclared non-dependant, it would always be a fraud against the second adult rebate system as well.

There are a whole host of things out there for you to investigate.  Start by looking at those things which have a benefit fraud element in them and then, once you’ve found your feet, move into investigating the purely corporate cases.  It’ll soon be like it was in benefit fraud.  And if you get stuck at all, just give us a call…