Benefit fraud information
Why do we investigate benefit and council tax fraud?
The Fraud Investigation Team strives to provide an efficient and effective service to the residents of the four authorities and one way that we can do this is to safeguard each council’s resources through effective policing of the council tax support scheme.
How many cases do we investigate?
The types of fraud we can investigate are widespread and varied. The different types of allegations we investigate include (but are not limited to):
- Working whilst claiming benefits
- Undeclared income coming into the household
- Failure to declare property, capital or investments
- Failure to declare a partner or other people living in the property
- Failure to declare a change in circumstances which can include change of address, income, savings and/or numbers of residents in a household
- Providing false or misleading information in support of a claim for benefits
- Receiving benefit payments that a person knows or suspects that they should not be receiving
We promise that we will look at every single allegation that we receive to consider whether there is a potential fraud to investigate.
In addition to ensuring that fraudsters are made to repay the money they were overpaid, the team takes further action where we believe that offences have occurred; between 1 April 2023 and 31 March 2024, the team prosecuted one person and either cautioned or fined a further 16 people who had committed benefit fraud when claiming council tax support.
Please see the sanctions and prosecution policy below for further information on how we protect the public funds we administer.
Last updated: 11/06/2024 10:20
