First off a story I have just heard, a man arranged a German car-sharing trip with a stranger, as is common-place over there, to a ferry port. This stranger calls off the trip, car is not ready. So our man takes the train to the ferry, missing the last ferry, to catch the ferry the next day. Arrives in England and is hauled off and subjected to a strip search, a thorough search of his luggage and some five hours of interrogation, where his denials were dismissed with disbelief and hostility. What is even worse, a female passenger, he just happened to exchange a couple of polite pleasantries with, sharing the hazards of travel sort of stuff, was also given the same treatment. His crime? He had by mischance managed to exchange a couple of EMails with a suspected drug dealer! What do we have, the planned car journey manifestly did not take place, the two individuals never met and we are left with secret snooping on private EMails giving rise to a suspicion, just a possibility with no tangible supporting actual physical evidence. Just a person somewhere being suspicious.
That evening I watched a documentary about benefit fraud (Britain on the Fiddle). Of the three cases offered up for our entertainment was the case of a man with two identities, one of which was also receiving disabled benefit, all fraudulently claim benefits. The hard physical evidence was there, double passports in two names, video recording of man working easily and physically with no sign of impairment, photo records of living at different addresses to that claimed, variety of cars all in use by him yet the investigation drags on because there is not yet enough evidence to ensure a conviction and the Police are too busy to bother with such a minor contraventions! So plenty of hard evidence but whether by incompetence, sloppy documentation leading it open to challenge or just too overwhelmed with work to fit in bringing the cast to court, a man manifestly living out a fraud, is allowed to continue. Eventually yes the wheels are in motion, months down the line and he does go to jail. But just compare and contrast. The overt working of the legal systems and the covert unaccountable systems.
If you have emotional hype on your side, think drugs, terrorism or even pedophilia, then anything can be justified, perpetrators are beyond any compassion, beyond any hope of even the most radical do gooder defending some basic civil right. No, for fear of condoning, we willingly acquiesce to secrecy, to abandonment of all rules of proof and justice being seen to be done. In our name we will allow unknown, unaccountable individuals to trash the rules that have been crafted over centuries to give everyone a chance to protest their innocence. Not to be subjected to the whim and fancy of a Another's suspicion.
In this oh so PC world we are tripping over our feet of zealous correctness and have lost our confidence to know right from wrong. So the burden of proof has to be able to withstand so many minor technicality challenges. For fear of giving offense we lean over backwards to allow the legal counter-challenges that then grind our system down so that fraudsters can wriggle this way and that way.
To interpose authority into someones life, to prohibit their freedom to carry on seeing a dying mother, or making that interview, or declaring their love or just travel for the joy of it, there has to be significant cause, not just an idle suspicion.
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fraud. Show all posts
Monday, 11 November 2013
Saturday, 8 January 2011
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.
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.
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