Accredited official statistics

Fraud and error in the benefit system: financial year 2015/16 preliminary estimates

Preliminary estimates of fraud and error levels in the benefit system in Great Britain in the financial year 2015/16.

• From: Department for Work and Pensions
• Published: 19 May 2016
• Last updated: 8 July 2016
  Show all updates

  1. 8 July 2016

     Revised tables: Moved Housing Benefit overpayments and underpayments due to Tax Credits out of Income – Other and into their own category (tables 3, 4, 9 and 10).

  2. 10 June 2016

     Amended the underpayment confidence intervals in the PDF publication (page 11) and in the spreadsheet (table 8). Also added the percentage of Housing Benefit cases overpaid and underpaid to the spreadsheet (tables 5 and 11).

  3. 19 May 2016

     First published.

This publication was withdrawn on 8 December 2016

We replaced these preliminary estimates with more up to date estimates of fraud and error in the benefit system on 8 December 2016.

Documents

Fraud and error in the benefit system: financial year 2015/16 preliminary estimates

PDF, 389 KB, 14 pages

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Tables: Fraud and error in the benefit system: financial year 2015/16 preliminary estimates

ODS, 290 KB

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Fraud and error in the benefit system: background information and methodology

PDF, 353 KB, 40 pages

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Details

This report provides preliminary estimates of fraud and error levels in the benefit system in Great Britain for the financial year 2015/16. It uses data from October 2014 to September 2015.

The main points from the report are:

• 1.8% of expenditure overpaid (this remains the lowest recorded rate, amounting to £3.1 billion of overpayments)
• 1.0% of expenditure underpaid (this is the highest recorded rate, amounting to £1.8 billion of underpayments)