Fraud perceptions and welfare recipients
Stagg warned that exaggerated fraud claims stigmatise and upset honest recipients, while underpayments are a greater problem; the Minister agreed that fraud must be kept in perspective. McDowell proposed independent surveys to measure abuse, and Higgins said House members themselves had helped create prejudice.
Will the Minister agree that the amount of under payment to social welfare recipients is greatly in excess of the amount of the alleged fraud he has spoken about? Will the Minister agree that the widespread and false impression about such fraud is created by the type of question tabled today? Will the Minister agree that that impression is causing upset to the many honest people who depend entirely on social welfare payments, that it is unnecessary to harass any recipients further and that such action is having a degrading effect on those people?
Comment on this
Will the Minister agree that the proper method of quantifying something which relates to fraud and which by its very nature poses difficulty in relation to quantification is to resort to the method proposed by the Commission on Taxation in their Fifth Report, to conduct surveys by independent agencies among vast sections of the population to ascertain whether there is a significant amount of welfare abuse rather than relying on the Minister's internal anti-fraud mechanisms? Will the Minister look to the Fifth Report which was concerned with income tax evasion and apply the same principles in an attempt to quantify the amount of social welfare fraud here?
