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<p>Under Universal Credit (UC) claimants will only have one claim to benefit, whereas
under Legacy, they may have made claims to multiple benefits. It is therefore not
possible to draw a direct comparison between the caseloads of UC and Legacy benefits.
UC will also incorporate Tax Credits which is currently administered by Her Majesty’s
Revenue and Customs, who record their overpayments differently.</p><p> </p><p>The
Department is open and transparent about the cost of fraud and error in the benefit
system, publishing our National “Fraud and Error in the Benefit System” statistics
each year which detail the amount we estimate is lost to both fraud and error across
all benefits.</p><p> </p><p>Most welfare losses, across Government, arise from claimants
failing to report changes of circumstances, Universal Credit (UC) provides a single,
digital interface through which claimants can more easily report these changes. As
such, once UC is fully rolled out, we expect cross-welfare losses to fraud, error
and overpayments to be reduced by around £1 billion per year. UC also allows us to
adjust benefit entitlement in line with changing circumstances in real time. Internal
and external data matches are increasingly helping to inform benefit payments and
alerting staff to check for any undeclared changes in people’s circumstances.</p><p
/><p>As of June 2019, the Department has received around 42,000 fraud referrals from
staff relating to potential fraudulent advance claims, which equates to less than
1 per cent of all Universal Credit claims.</p>
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