Dwp checking what you spend your benefits on

Broken2025

i  am reading in the press that the DWP are ringing people asking about certain transactions on their account and how they spend the money they get are they allowed to do this it seems like an invasion of ones privacy so what Authority do they have to do this?

DE_612183

have you got a link to this press item?

or are you confusing it with the story about asylum seekers using the daily welfare payment to use in casinos?

la531983

At the risk of being controversial it seems fair enough to me if you are spending taxpayers money that they might actually perform some due diligence on what it was being spent on. I appreciate this opinion wont be universally popular on here.

DE_612183

la531983 said:

At the risk of being controversial it seems fair enough to me if you are spending taxpayers money that they might actually perform some due diligence on what it was being spent on. I appreciate this opinion wont be universally popular on here.

as a tax payer I agree with you.

daveyjp

Any mention of 'reading in press' should include a link.

Broken2025

as a carer that works just as hard as anyone else who works i don't agree or are carers not allowed to have a life 

Voyager2002

Some people cheat... in particular, it is not unknown for people claiming means-tested benefits to "forget" about other sources of income and odd bits of savings. The DWP therefore monitor activity on bank accounts, and may suspend benefits if anything suspicious is noticed. Since real hardship can result if benefits are suspended, I think it is great to give the claimant the opportunity to explain anything that appears to be suspicious: often there is some perfectly reasonable explanation.

I would add that while the amounts of most benefits are small, the money paid is absolutely the claimant's property, to be spent in any way that the claimant chooses. While a DWP officer might reasonably suspect fraud if someone spends an entire week's income on dance lessons, if they then explain that they lived on just milk and potatoes for a month in order to afford this, that is their prerogative. 

Grumpy_chap

Broken2025 said:

i  am reading in the press that the DWP are ringing people asking about certain transactions on their account and how they spend the money they get are they allowed to do this it seems like an invasion of ones privacy so what Authority do they have to do this?

What "press" are you referring to?
Is this in the context of verifying that money is not being shrouded to avoid reductions in UC payments by reducing declared capital?
Sometimes, the headline in the "press" needs to be disregarded and the detail in the article needs to be understood to allow more comprehensive comment.

Muttleythefrog

During the routine reviews they ask about transactions on account... sometimes silly things including spending. But they primarily will focus on monies coming in especially anything regular or indeed payments going out to people like relatives. You can spend your money as you wish. Newspaper articles are designed to provoke and cause concern... it is extremely unlikely out of the blue the DWP are going to call up and ask about a transaction since at the moment they do not even have standard access to such information.

TELLIT01

DWP are far more likely to be interested in the monies going into bank accounts than that going out.  When I worked on benefits processing at DWP we would regularly see bank statements and would have little interest in the detail of spending.  In one exceptional instance, I did see one claimant's bank statement which was deep in the red, and probably half of the spending was on purchased related to a game app on a mobile phone.  That's the sort of situation where flagging to somebody may have been beneficial to the claimant.  The reality is that it was none of our business and all we would probably see over time is greater and greater debt.

MeteredOut

In my experience "reading in the press" without a source often means "saw it on social media", which contains *lots* of fake news.