Last night’s documentary, On the Fiddle, featured benefit fraud investigators and benefits compliance officers up and down the country whose job it is to uncover those who make fraudulent claims for state benefits. And uncover them they did in one case which I’ll go into more detail about shortly, but for now, suffice to say there was a huge operation to uncover and apprehend the suspect. Fine, ok, and rightly so; he was costing the taxpayer thousands annually and deserved to be caught.

However, the reason this show angered me is because as many revelations about MPs claims for expenses continue to flood the press – which have been proven to be unjustified and often falsely claimed – why aren’t we seeing police and several civil servants kicking in the doors of their homes at 4am in a bid to prove culpability in stealing public money?

How is it that MPs claiming taxpayer’s money for things they aren’t entitled to any different from a member of the public claiming taxpayer’s money that they’re not entitled to? Read more & comment »