£4.5bn lost to fraud in three COVID schemes as Rishi Sunak’s Eat Out to Help Out scheme recorded 9.5% rate of fraud, HMRC says

22 comments

  1. The people at the top have looted so much money from the system with tax breaks, offshore accounts, dodgy deals with lobbyist and donors gifting money. May as well let us common folks loot as much as we can before the UK collapses.

  5. Ah it’s fine, they were probably Tory voters. Nothing to see here. Nothing to investigate.

  7. >£4.5bn, of which the taxpayer is only going to get £1.1bn back

    Here we go again.

    Reminds me when corporations get to “negotiate” with HMRC what they owe, and it’s always a lot lower.

    If they can identify fraud, they can get it back…

    There was a takeaway near me that was on the scheme, because it had one table in the shop. I wonder if that’s counted

    >The scheme, which offered a 50% discount of up to £10 per person during August to boost the hospitality sector, was used for more than 100 million meals across the UK.

  8. And that’s probably generously low. It’s probably more like upwards of 90% inflated corruption. If something costs £10, they will charge £1000 for it. They are morally bankrupt and utterly unsafe to trust with a potato gun let alone the public purse. A reminder that test and trace should have cost £1 billion as that’s what EU spent on a successful system. Here they spent £32,000,000,000. That’s £32 Billion. And it didn’t work. Unbelievably corrupt. It all amounts to financial terrorism. That’s what the Tories specialise in.

  9. £4.5bn lost to fraud and the media will go on a witch hunt on someone who is on benefits who smokes/has sky.

  10. Let’s be honest.. the government simply panicked and blindly threw money at the problem, as they were in uncharted territory, and fighting it out with the rest of the world to get their hands on PPE and to keep the lights on at home. Tens of billions of pounds of it. Arguably, had we not had the war with Russia thrown into the mix, and had we not gone ahead with the stupidity of Brexit, we’d probably be in a position as a country where yes we would have had a massive debt to repay over the next 20 years but probably would have managed it and they probably would have got away without much scrutiny as a result. But of course the government essentially went all in with the countries finances on the assumption that nothing else could possibly go wrong.. and of course it did.. and here we are, wondering where it all went wrong.

  11. I took a bounce back loan. It was the only ‘support’ that I got. Why should I continue to pay the interest on it when all I am doing is funding those who stole.

  13. Reminder if a pensioner accidently claims £1.50 too much in benefits then HMRC send the police round to smash the door down to taze then. If you simply claim £50,000 in benefits fraudulently as a company they give you an mbe.

  14. A certain multi-million dollar pizza franchise in my area were taking advantage of the scheme. No eat in and their business was probably booming anyway as a result of increased takeaway business.

  16. It was only a few days ago that it hit me that a huge beneficiary of this scheme was…corporate landlords…

    A govt. scheme that encouraged people to eat in restaurants even though they didn’t need to, that helped to continue paying the rent of those restaurants who occupy buildings owned by Tory donors who didn’t want to see their investments fail.

    Do you ever stop to think about the cost benefit analysis those fuckers did, working out exactly how many people the country could afford to lose before they actually had to do something to help (that wasn’t of direct benefit to their mates)?

  17. Who cares? I’m more concerned with those pesky Universal Credit claimants!

    ​

    Got to make sure I vilify the poor and disabled so that I don’t notice the Gov’s mates fleecing the public purse. /s

  18. Lets not forget the contribution “eat out to help out” made to boosting covid infection rates and thus killing thousands of people nationwide.

  19. Hahaha no way reddit is gonna get pissy with fraud on the eat out to help out scheme, you’re not supposed to care about fraud

    When it’s UC fraud it’s all about everything else that’s a problem.

  22. I worked in AML during the covid pandemic and the majority of the alerts were on individuals primarily from Romanian, Africa and India. That’s largely why a lot of the money can’t be recovered. The cost and resource required to even try to recoup that figure from foreign based OCGs isn’t worth it.

Leave a Reply