The story seems, at first glance, a straightforward matter of benefit fraud:

A MOTHER-OF-THREE continued to claim Income Support despite having scooped £100,000 on a National Lottery scratchcard, a court has heard

However, in the course of this story being reported we find this particular line in the Burton Mail’s coverage…

Disney was rumbled after routine checks by DWP bosses revealed she had £100,000 stashed away in her account.

Which then become even more intriguing as during the course of this story being reported on by BBC Midlands Today the reporter stated that the fraud had been uncovered by the DWP’s ‘new supercomputer’ - this report was not put online, sorry.

One of big and largely unanswered “what if’s” of the ID cards debate is the question of ‘what if the government could access to your bank account?’ - which forgets entirely that for anyone already receiving welfare benefits by direct payment, the government already has the full details of their bank account anyway.

However, if the BBC’s local news report is correct - and not a bit of “let’s try and scare the fraudster’s” type propaganda from the DWP - then it appears that the DWP is in a position to do far more than just pay money into your account. At the very least, this report suggests that this ‘new supercomputer’ can also check your balance as well, just in case you haven’t declared any savings.

Which is odd, as I seem to have missed the bit where the DWP were given the legal authority to make such checks without, seemingly, the account holder’s consent - unless there’s some sort of consent clause tucked away in the small print on benefit claim forms these days.

Moreover, the Burton Mail article refers to this having been uncovered as part of ‘routine checks’ - which taken together with the BBC’s report seems to clearly suggest that the DWP is using some sort of new computer system to routinely monitor the bank/building society accounts of benefit claimants - a fact which, as this case demonstrates, claimants appear to be entirely unaware of.

And, one might reasonably conjecture, if the DWP indeed has this ability then it probably won’t be too long before these same capabilities find their way into the ‘armoury’ of the Inland Revenue via its role in administering and distributing tax credits. In fact, for all we know for sure, it may already have this capability or least be able to access it via the DWP as I can recall there were some regulatory changes made a few years back to allow greater sharing of information between the Inland Revenue at what was then the Department of Social Security.

So what, exactly, is going on here? Does the DWP have, as seems to be suggested, a new financial surveillance system and, if so, why has this not been disclosed to the public given that, if this is true, it has profound civil liberities implications which clearly have been neither raised nor addressed openly.

Sorry, simply can’t think of a non-disgusting title for a post noting that in Olathe, Kansas a High School Student has been arrested amd charged with battery against a school official after vomiting on his Spanish teacher.

Despite the student’s efforts to attribute his act of regurgitative dexterity to examination stress, witnesses have apparently come forward and alleged that this was, in fact, a deliberate act.

Thinking back to my own school days I can think of one or two teachers who might have deserved similar treatment, but then they were also the kind of teachers who were made of sterner stuff than the ‘victim’ of this rather unusual assault and would probably have responded by instructing the unfortunate ‘vomitee’ to descend the verb ‘to barf’ in Spanish and have their answer ready by the time the teacher got back from cleaning up.

File this one under ‘Only in America’.