Benefits agency unable to investigate 3,000 fraud cases

The enforcement department of benefits agency UWV were unable to investigate more than 3 thousand reports of fraud last year because "the workload was too great". This is based on UWV internal correspondence in the possession of newspaper Trouw, NOS reports. The correspondence shows that nothing was done with 100 reports that were more than two years old. The UWV decided ti was "unacceptable" to confront people with fraud after such a long time. Some 2 thousand anonymous reports older than 20 weeks were left uninvestigated. And 1,500 others were sorted based on the probability of the culprit being caught. If the probability was too small, the case was put aside. A spokesperson for the benefits agency told NOS that anonymous reports typically yield little. The UWV received about 60 thousand reports of fraud last year. The service is currently busy with a reorganization. A total of 300 jobs in the fraud departments will be scrapped in the coming years. The number of inspectors will be reduced from 185 to 115. The inspectors also had fewer hours to handle each case last year. In the last few months they had 30 hours per case, compared to the usual 50 hours.