To be annoyed with someone blatantly ' playing the system'

[Creamcheeseontoast]

Just a general annoyance.. A close friend of mine and her husband used to get tonnes in WTC etc.. However he started earning more and they stopped thier payments..
They were annoyed about this and thought it was a struggle getting by. So he has ' moved out' which he hasn't but is using his brothers as a postal address.

They said its wrong how people work they their backsides off and get nothing.
Yet doing it this way she gets her part time wage.. Plus all the help she can which covers bills and his wage is ' spending money' aside from. His own things like car insurance..

It annoys me as I see so many people talking how they generally struggle and then there are people playing the system and get away with it.

Just a general rant really and to see if many others get annoyed by things like this

well i hope she dosent plaster happy family pictures of them all on holiday etc,many have been caught like that

Big difference to 'the rich' who are using legal loopholes to retain their money from HMRC and benefit fraud which is illegal and directly stealing taxpayers' money

on Facebook i meant

@ThinkingQueSeraSera they’re only legal loopholes because it suits the government and their donors not to make them illegal. Morally it’s worse imo.

"Big difference to 'the rich' who are using legal loopholes to retain their money from HMRC and benefit fraud which is illegal and directly stealing taxpayers' money"

Yes, the 'rich' are stashing it in their banks rather than spending it and putting the money into the economy.

Also, we are all taxpayers. Even those benefit claimants who spend it all on fags and booze and massive tvs are paying tax. Or is it only income tax that counts?

Yes, I'm stretching things here, but I also think it's stretching things to say that legal means it's all fine and not at all wrong.

Report them, it's fraud (a crime).

^ Not all rich people, not all benefit claimants.

The self employed cash in hand people need to contribute more.

I always pay cash to get a better deal and people always accept it.

I always pay cash to get a better deal and people always accept it

Then you’re potentially enabling tax evasion, and are part of the problem.

Also, we are all taxpayers

Not everyone. Anybody that wholly relies on benefits or doesn't work are tax payers. They may purchase items and pay VAT but it's paid with either money that came from the state anyway or from another taxpayer.

Report, it’s theft.

Not everyone. Anybody that wholly relies on benefits or doesn't work are tax payers. They may purchase items and pay VAT but it's paid with either money that came from the state anyway or from another taxpayer

Bullshit. I’m a SAHM and I pay tax on money in the bank, I paid a ridiculous amount of inheritance tax on my mum’s legacy, and I pay council tax.

I know of a couple of self employed taxi drivers who only claim to work part time and claim massive amounts in working and child tax credits(large families). Must be fairly easy to fiddle the system in a job that deals entirely in cash!

I do take issue with a previous poster's view that if you are really "working your arse off", you wouldn't need benefits.

I work in the care sector, and see people working themselves to the bone, doing hard physical and emotional graft, more than full time, on diabolical wages. The only reason they can put food on the table is that their shit pay is supplemented by benefits.

People aren't on benefits because they are lazy.

People aren't on benefits because they are lazy

YY to this!!!!

People aren't on benefits because they are lazy

I don't doubt that some aren't but you would have to be very naive to believe it off all. Plenty turn down overtime, won't work more than a few hours or have a non working partner.

I'm concerned by the conflation of legality with ethics.

Just because one thing is legal and another illegal that doesn't automatically make the illegal thing worse. It depends on what the things are.

Ethics dictate the law... well... eventually, anyway, when the law finally catches up with our understanding of what's ethical.

The law does not dictate ethics. It's merely a tool to enable their enforcement, and basing your idea of what's better or worse on what's legal and illegal is a very bad road to go down, as any of any number of examples from history illustrate.

I might report people of the kind mentioned in the OP, depending on how sure I was of what was going on.

But there's no way in hell I'd get anywhere near as wound up about it as I do about the way money is being drained out of our economy by the day, right at the top, because it simply isn't anywhere near as damaging in terms of the human misery it causes.

everyone fiddles the system if they can
No they don’t. Most people still see theft for what it is - theft and don’t seek to justify it by saying ‘other people do it’. (Regardless of wether the ‘others’ are rich or not)

Not that you have to be as bothered by the less bad thing for the less bad thing to matter at all, of course. I'm just going with the comparisons upthread.

I know a family where both parents don't work, kids on free school meals. Holidays to Spain every few months, Mum drives a brand new flashy car, DC in designer gear. The Dad buys and sells second hand cars all cash in hand.

Another person I know got caught saying her DP wasn't living with her when he was. She got told to stop claiming immediately and got told to pay it back at £2 a week! Hardly a deterrent.

I notice we've already seen that people are outraged about where their taxes are going but someone's admitted to paying cash for a better deal and colluding with tax evasion.

Why do people always, always pull up the “straight out of the Daily fucking Mail” people on benefits they know? Why does nobody ever talk about the person who waited for months, terrified they weren’t going to manage because their claim took far too long? Or the person who was sanctioned because they were in hospital? Or the family who have children with disabilities who face shit like the attitudes on here daily but still get on with life despite being forced below the breadline by the meagre amount in benefits deemed fit by the government? Or pensioners? Or someone so debilitated by mental health problems they can’t work?

Why? Because it makes them feel better to trot out these extraordinary cases and make them sound like they’re the norm. Get a fucking grip.

Everyone fiddles the system if they can

Not everyone does but the vast majority try to make the system work for them.

@Kursk but unless you had your own private road system, your own private bin men collecting your bins, your own private police to arrest anyone if you'd been unlucky enough to get mugged, you'd have still been benefitting from the taxes the rest of us paid whilst gaming the system to avoid paying tax and claim benefits in order to save up the money to emigrate.

Well done you.

AHungryMum

We moved out of the UK to avoid society. Where we live now we are outside of the range of the police.

We don’t have bin men. We have to recycle/ burn our rubbish.

We live on a 15 mile long private road and avoid going into town.