Investigating Tax and Supplementary Benefit Fraud

Abstract

The slogan that ‘there is one law for the rich and another lbr the poor’ is often used, in commonsense terms, to explain unequal responses to those who fiddle personal taxes and those who fiddle welfare benefits. Both tax and benefit fraudsters engage in similar economic crimes — defrauding the public purse by making false statements to government departments — but social responses to these activities differ widely. Through research, conducted between 1984 and 1988, I explored the ‘rich law, poor law’ slogan by analysing, first, the precise nature of’ the activities engaged in by the relatively ‘rich’ who evade income tax and the ‘poor’ who fiddle supplementary benelit;¹ second, the ways in which these illegal activities were regulated by the Inland Revenue and DHSS,² both in official ‘theory’ and in investigatory practice; and third, the different social and judicial responses to tax and benefit fraud. Although tax fraud is clearly more costly than benefit fraud (Keith (committee, 1983; Board of Inland Revenue, 1983/4, 1988), social security ‘scroungers’ are represented as posing a greater social threat than tax evaders in political, popular and official discourses (Golding and Middleton, 1982).