Universal Credit: Fraud
(asked on 23rd October 2019) - View Source
Question to the Department for Work and Pensions:
To ask the Secretary of State for Work and Pensions, how many instances of universal credit advance fraud have been investigated by her Department in each month since the introduction of full service.
The Department has captured discrete figures on the number of investigations for this type of fraud since February 2019. A breakdown of how many cases have been either completed, or are at some stage of investigation is shown in the table below.
Month | February | March | April | May | June | July | August | September |
Number of cases | 200 | 900 | 1,600 | 800 | 900 | 1,300 | 4,800 | 5,300 |
*These figures have been sourced from internal management information and were not intended for public release. They are subject to change and should not be compared to other figures subsequently released by the Department. These figures have been rounded to the nearest 100.
As the scale of this issue has increased, we have dedicated more resource to the team investigating this fraud. We have also worked with operational staff to improve the referral process. This allows referrals to be routed to investigators and progressed more quickly.