Benefits Bounty Hunters
News hits us today that benefit fraud will be tackled partly by using credit rating agencies making use of commercially-available data.
All of the information in the world is useless unless you know how to query it intelligently, so to use welfare data and data that is publicly available or on sale about spending patterns, loans etc is a big job. The savings could be enormous. £1billion out of £5.2 billion fraud is suggested by the Telegraph and £1.5B by the BBC who must have had a different press release. The Left, sacred of seeing their voting client base deprived of taxpayer-funded SkyTV, exotic parrots and holidays to Las Vegas aren’t impressed and BBC R4 are furious, but you know you’re doing something right when the BBC are against it (read the Analysis of their Chief Political Correspondent who puts the majority of it down to clerical errors and bad typing).
There’s no ‘civil liberties’ argument to be had here, or if there is it’s a false one, because nothing new is being recorded or held. It’s only existing stuff being looked at properly.
Still, there’s an attractive mental image to be had of a masked David Cameron walking up and down a line at Conservative HQ consisting of Boba Fett, Dog the Bounty Hunter and Chuck Norris wheezing “You are free to use any methods necessary, but I want them alive…No disintegrations.” (audio!)
OK, if only using commercially derived data, that doesn’t sound so bad. What Experian are really doing is seeing whether known expenditure can be funded out ofd state benefits. I suspect that the company will flag those with undeclared sources of income, also benefit claimants who really are living wildly beyond their means.
Mind you, greatly widening the proportion of the population who have been credit checked (and whose benefit payments would have previously been hidden from Experian) is probably a bonus for the company…
If this is as far as it goes, fine, but it has the potential to get out of hand and, as someone who already greatly distrusts Europhile Cameron and his motives, I’m concerned that this will only be the tip of the iceberg and so I wonder how long it will be before they start delving into everyone’s bank accounts as a matter of course. *DONT_KNOW* 🙁
Its the natural way of the world that things slip and good intentions fade. Hopefully when we see the details we’ll see some safeguards in place.
In this arena frankly I’m more annoyed by the smash’n’grab on “dormant” accounts which haven’t been touched for years. I’ve got one which will fall into that category and must do something about it before it’s nicked to fund an Ethical Plastic Wheelbarrow Disability Scheme somewhere.
Decent datamining could look for a specific dataset of people who are
. Both parents registered unemployed
. Have a big mortgage
. Drive a BMW
. Own a boat
. Took the family to Egypt on hols last year
My plumber will be screwed. Which cheers me up hugely.
Serious point, though. That’s how you’d do the datamining. Run a query to produce a list of unemployed people with no registered form of income, but with big house, boat and big cars….delete Prince Edward from the list…and then pass the list to the Govt for checking over. You’re just using their datamining expertise and their access to the other databases they already tap into.
This is no more intrusive than the credit check Experian ran on me to get my mortgage. They did one to determine if I could get that, so why not do exactly the same thing to determine if I can get another financial service?
errr…since w
oh fuck it i cant be arsed were all fucked anyway, the nazi’s appear to have won