Finding the Fraud

The hardest bias to eliminate in proving a scientific theory is that of prior expectation. The researcher, knowing what he expects to see, will find it within the data, when another unbiased person would not. It skews the results, unfavourably. No proof is certain until another, remote uninvolved, institute has replicated it. All very pragmatic, detached and objective way of assessing and limiting the errors of our human vulnerabilities.

How come then when we have a need to overhaul the disability financial support allowances, it is prefaced with that statement that twenty percent savings are to be achieved in the process! If you are starting out on a major policy procedural revue, the last thing you want to do is to cloud your starting point with prejudiced presumptions based on nothing more than speculation, hearsay and the roar of the crowd. Any manager worth their salt would say first off, sort out your facts, know your starting position and be very clear what your goal is, keep it clear and simple.

But then it does not matter about being rigorous in our approach because these are only disabled people with no clout or large well of support. It does not matter then if the threat of yet another fraud seeking investigation puts each and every one on suspicion; each has yet again to go through the humiliating hoop of proving the self-evident that they are unable to cope as well as a 'normal' person; suffer the indignities of some disinterested investigator putting them through meaningless tests that might never in a million years expose the real handicaps they have to struggle and cope with which may actually take insight and compassion to begin to understand and, to cap it off, have there noses rubbed in the social smear yet again that they are dependant on support and help and they are not free agents to do what they want, when they want it.

The justification for all this is there is blatant fraud going on and our country needs to make huge savings inorder to survive let alone recover from the brink of financial ruin. Surely everyone would willingly want to play their part. If only we were all of equal stature.

Rather than harangue the claimants for their suspected misuse of the rules and forms prescribed for them to follow, equally the blame could be placed at the feet of the managers. Let us investigate these lax managers that allow frauds or false claims to be made, unchallenged and do not tighten up procedures or guidance to minimise the scope for abuse of the systems. Lets sack the managers with high claim records and make all the savings that way!.

This is where the heart of the problem lays. It is yet another example of the systematic failings of centralised control, remote form the actual interface, that just cannot devise questions, rules and procedures capable of coping or defining the infinitely wide range of human responses and conditions out there across the whole spectrum of humanity. Even if the impossible was achievable it would then only become the next target to prove that the defined is well short of limits of human ingenuity. What we expect as our social right is rough justice. Not exactly equal to everyone, nor exactly equal wherever or however, just lumped together, across the board, a rough parity can be seen. This requires a human commonsense interface, flexible, adjustable, empowered to apply discretion, compassionate and above all accountable.

Our national effort and technology should put its muscle here where it can be really useful. To provide comparators, to example best practice or to alert to weakness and excesses. Provide good, robust and understandable on demand support but leaving the human agents to make those thousand and one incomparable comparisons, applying their skills to balance the dissimilarities. That is what our brains are good at. The bottom line is what rule, question or procedure can define just how much personal effort is necessary to overcome a weakness. None, it is a piece of string exercise and only the human interface can judge when enough is enough and some help will go a long way.

Who ever signed off on this initiative deserves to be taken out into the street and shot in front of the cameras, no trial, no judge, no jury just let presumption, prejudice and sentiment decide.