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Thousands in London Face Incorrect Benefit Cuts From Automated Fraud Detector (sky.com)
Thousands of people could soon be receiving letters threatening to cut off vital housing benefits as they face being incorrectly targeted by a new automated fraud detector. From a report: The government-backed London Counter Fraud Hub, developed by BAE, has been hailed a success after being trialled in four boroughs - Camden, Ealing, Croydon and Islington. Using vast quantities of data from millions of households, it is designed to target potential fraud cases involving the single person council tax discount, subletting in local authority housing and business rate relief and rating.
Ealing, the lead council for the project, found the automated elements of the system targeting single person discount fraud was 80% effective -- which is seen as an acceptable benchmark. With just over one million claimants of council tax single person discount in London, the London Counter Fraud Hub estimates it will detect around 40,000 fraudulent cases in the first year. Critics say the 20% error rate is unacceptable as around 8,000 people will receive letters wrongly accusing them of fraud.
Ealing, the lead council for the project, found the automated elements of the system targeting single person discount fraud was 80% effective -- which is seen as an acceptable benchmark. With just over one million claimants of council tax single person discount in London, the London Counter Fraud Hub estimates it will detect around 40,000 fraudulent cases in the first year. Critics say the 20% error rate is unacceptable as around 8,000 people will receive letters wrongly accusing them of fraud.
If people want "benefits" let them get job and fucking PAY FOR THEM like all the rest of us always do. Vast majority of people who get them are not really even need them. Like all welfare queen they just prefer to leech off goverment and keep voting for other leftists to keep the gravy flowing at taxpayer expenses. The fraud algoithm detected them BECAUSE they are all the frauds!
They do need to work on their error rate, but they should be working on the false negatives. The false positives can be handled with a human investigator.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
So they analyzed 1,000,000 claims, and detected 40,000 of those were fraudulent. Of which 8,000 were "incorrectly" marked as fraudulent. That sounds like a pretty decent first run to me. Unless you want to manually look through 1,000,000 claims, or pay a team to look them all over. This just reduced the cost to identify fraudulent claims by 25x.
Not perfect, no. But having a team analyze the 40,000 claims it kicked out is a heck of a lot cheaper than analyzing the 1,000,000 that went in.