Comments by "" (@charliemoore2551) on "The government’s losing nearly £60 billion a year to fraud" video.

  1. Spot on. New systems and technology could have been used to allow what were then the Inland Revenue, HM Customs, the Dept of Health and Social Security and Dept of Employment to work more effectively - In other words, they could have facilitated able and motivated people to improve the job they were already doing well. They could have improved outcomes. Instead, the systems were deployed in such a way as to achieve the same outcomes but with less people. What's more they also removed much of the skill and motivation. When I joined the Inland Revenue in 1975, it took 12 months to train a Tax Officer. At the end of the training he or she could be deployed without supervision in several different kinds of tax and understood the interaction between all of them. What's more, as you say, they knew their local area, they knew who needed help and they knew the dodgy traders, employers and accountants. It wasn't the best job in the world but I and most of my colleagues took some pride in doing it well. The Tax Officer's modern-day equivalent is trained in a matter of days, works from a script and has little or no idea what the on-screen selections they make mean. More to your point, they don't have a hope in Hades of spotting the organised fraudsters that have evolved to boiler-room scale as a result.
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