Do I keep quiet or report for potential benefit fraud?

[Keepnoseoutorreport]

I've namechanged (feel free to check with HQ)

So an acquaintance has had anxiety for years, claims PIP and can't work. I have anxiety too and know how crippling it can be it's absolutely horrific and find at its worst it stops me engaging in a social life, stops me sleeping, and I can barely function. So I'm not without sympathy.

However. This acquaintance has for the past 6 weeks without fail been out 2 or 3 times a week on big nights out, music gigs, hen dos etc and posted the photos all over facebook. In the next post the next day moaning that she is broke, too unwell to work and scared of losing her PIP

Now I'm getting pretty sick of it and feel she is taking the piss a bit and the way I see it I have a couple of options;

1. congratulate her on her recovery and quietly suggest she minds her Facebook closer as people may not take kindly to her posts

2. report her to dwp

3. seethe, delete and ignore and let her trip herself up in due course.

I'm torn between 1 and 3 in all honesty.

Fucks sake! The amount of ignorance and assumed information on this thread is unreal!

Goes to show how little intelligence some of you have, even though you think you are so 'clued up' Pmsl

Once you've been through the PIP process or have assisted someone through it, then you can comment on how 'easy it is' and 'how anyone can get it'. Because the reality is, that's not what you'll be saying.

Once you realise how many hoops have to be jumped through, how many specialists have to be contacted and provide evidence, then you will realise how difficult it is.

It is not an out of work benefit, it is not means tested. It's there to assist people to lead a normal life! What normal is will differ for each person.

My PIP pays for cleaners weekly, taxi's when I can't drive, when I'm well swimming sessions and if I'm really lucky some acupuncture.

But I guess to the outside world me having cleaners, going swimming, having taxi's and going for acupuncture seems like I love the life of riley!

I would swop that, the 32 tablets a day, morphine every 4 hours, the pain, the depression, the mania and the shit life me and my children now have any day.

I wouldn rather have my career and my salary which was 4x's my benefits any day!

Instead life gave me bipolar, fibromyalgia, osteoarthritis and several slipped discs (I still thank the man who drove into me because he didn't look for that last one).

I just hope that those of you on this thread or reading this, that are all high and mighty about something you probably have little idea, that you are not ever in the position that you need to claim. Because 2 years ago I wasn't. Then life threw me a curveball. Never count your chickens, because anything can happen to you, and you could be in the same situation. See how you deal with assumptions being made about you then.........

2

Report. If she can have 3 nights out a week, she can go to work and stop relying on the state to fund her.
So, how much do you know about anxiety? Or invisible disabilities?
There are weeks when I might manage a couple of nights without shitting myself, or when I take extra medication that I'm not supposed to take more than twice in a month, to enable me to go out. I am unable to work because I can shit myself up to 15 times a day. Imagine how pleasant that is to work with...

@Gilead don’t feel you have to justify yourself to anyone. You don’t and they’re the unreasonable ones for expecting you to.

Clearly you are not that knowledgeable about the pip process OR mental health issues and how they manifest op.

Quite what you'd report and to who i have no idea

Snowysky - same. Five years ago I had a teaching career, my own home, a top of the range BMW and anything I wanted.

Now I have a wheelchair, a council house with stairs everywhere, food banks, severe pain and life in my bedroom.

I'd give anything to have my life back instead of the £140 a week I get for PIP.

smeddum Again, Thank you!

@Gilead

@ICantCopeAnymore I’m sorry you’ve been made to feel crap by this thread too. It’s not right at all.

My DH suffers with severe anxiety. He can still work. He can still go to different places.

There are things he cannot deal with as part of his diagnosis but who are you to say what someone can and cannot do because they have been diagnosed with anxiety? Anxiety has different triggers for different people.

Mind your own business.

I take heart that about 95% of the responses on this thread to the OP show they understand it is impossible to assess someone’s condition from some events on Facebook.

Op's of this kind of thread always Nc too - so don't even have the courage to have an anon username associated with such a despicable THOUGHT let alone action! Says it all really.

Awful. PIP is so hard to get that she must have had a huge amount of evidence to show the extent of her disabilities.

This is why I don't tell anyone I get PIP (or ESA, or the other benefits I get). I have severe MH difficulties but there is so much stigma about them that many people simply aren't aware, because I hide myself away when I'm having a bad period, so nobody sees how bad it gets. The only people who do know are the MH professionals involved in my care, and luckily they are the ones whose opinions make a difference with applications. I've also stopped sharing information on social media (I only keep a FB account open just to get information from the various disability support groups on there). I just know I'd get judgemental comments and risk being reported for fraud, and I couldn't face having my benefits stopped or investigated.

How much do you earn OP?

If you are in the bottom half of the population of tax payers, you and your family if you have one, get free education, health, benefits (like child benefit, child trust fund payments or whatever), etc from the welfare state - more than you pay in tax?

Why should higher rate tax payers subsidise you and you family, if you can’t pay for what you take out from the system?

Don’t bleat on about how tax payers have a duty to report benefit cheats, until you are net contributor!

OP.

Do everyone a favour and MYOB.

The DWP won't thank you for being a time waster.

Oh, and unfriend your Facebook friend.

For her sake, not yours.

My dsis has just applied for pip. She has progressive supernuclei palsy and wasn’t sure she was entitled. A lovely man from welfare benefits helped her fill the form in her own house.

She will have to wait 8-12 weeks for her assessment as there is a backlog. But the man from welfare benefits has already sorted out a social worker, commode, wheelchair, OT, physio for her. All stuff her useless consultant/gp should have sorted but haven’t.

It took me 2 days to fill in the ESA form for DD; and two years including a formal complaint twice, for her to be put in the Support group - luckily, we could afford to keep her, until they paid over £6,000 in arrears. Three years later, I had to spend another two days filling in the form again, to say her life threatening condition had not got better (seeing as there is no known cure).

It took me, a welfare advisor and a threat of an appeal to the tribunal to get her DLA at the higher rate for care and mobility.

Yet, with a change of circumstance, they stopped paying Motability for her car for 6 months, even though they had made no decision about her entitlement - and I was told to return the car by Motability. Two weeks of phone calls to the DWP by me, and they agreed by law she had been entitled to the Mobility all along and they paid the arrears.

I would not report other people to the DWP, when I can imagine the devastating effects of benefits being summarily stopped, while the DWP takes months to make a decision - when those people have conditions, I do not understand and I have no idea what advice medical professionals have given them!

It all strikes me as envy and scapegoating of people getting what £10,000 pa? Its nothing to be jealous of, while people get away with evading tax on a grand scale!