Average cost of local authority benefit fraud per case, £2,166. Average cost of tax avoidance, per case, £248,780

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I thought the astonishing average £248,780 cost of each tax avoidance case identified as outstanding at H M Revenue & Customs by the National Audit Office should be benchmarked for comparison. The total outstanding is £10.2 billion.

So I've compared it with the average cost of each local authority housing can council tax fraud case identified in a report by the Audit Commission, also published this month. They found fraud of £117 million spread over 54,000 cases in 2011/12. That's an average cost of £2,166 each. I suspect that is typical of all benefit frauds.

Let's plot this:

Now which one of those two requires more attention and publicity, do you think?

So why do we always here about benefit fraud?


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