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Benefit claimants 'to be forced to take lie detector tests'
BillieTheBot
Posts: 8,721 Bot
http://money.guardian.co.uk/news_/story/0,,2160873,00.htmlBenefit claimants and job seekers could be forced to take lie detector tests as early as next year after an early review of a pilot scheme exposed 126 benefit cheats in just three months, saving one local authority £110,000.
Last May, the Department for Work and Pensions asked Harrow council in London to undertake a year-long, £63,000 pilot of the ground-breaking Voice Risk Analysis (VRA) technology.
'We will wait until the end of the formal evaluation period to make a final decision about rolling the technology out across the country but this early review by the council is very positive,' said a spokesman for the DWP.
WTF???
This country is starting to make 1984 look like a hippy commune.
Can I suggest giving lie detectors to all who are self employed and those who earn over 100K a year, least they're engaging in tax evasion?
Why stop there? We could stop people at random on the street and ask them whether they have broken the law in any way whatsoever recently. If you've got nothing to hide you've got nothing to fear, right?
Fucking hell.
Beep boop. I'm a bot.
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Comments
Neither of those will ever happen, and this won't either. Whoever said spin was dead under Gordon Brown?
and this is a bad thing?
I've seen that program a couple of times since being off work. My god.
A couple of times? My god, I dunno how you could have even sat through one!
I understand what you are saying but if MOST applicants were applying illegally, then the tests would be fair enough ... but as it is only a small percentrage that are, why put EVERYONE through it? They should follow up on suspects in a different manner.
Unless, of course, they are swan-eating immigrants ...
will they do the same about all the tax dodgers?
or builders?
I don't immediately draw distinction between asking someone to take a lie detector test and asking them to provide evidence that they've been applying for jobs and attending interviews - which presumably they ask of everyone. I haven't thought much into this, but i don't seem to have the same instinctive reaction everyone else does. £110,000 saving seems like a lot of money to me, and certainly could do a lot of good in a local school - for example.
Hanging isn't good enough for those swan-eating terrorists....
Isn't the lie detector test's deployment more a question of practicality than anything else? I this it's fallacious to try draw direct comparison between testing people claiming benefits and testing random members of the public.
Lol exactly what I was thinking!!
This is ridiculous.
'terrorists' or 'immigrants'? Same difference, I suppose ...
Agree.
If it were used as a red flag system, whereby people who fell foul of the lie detector where investigated more thoroughly by a human, I can see it being a fairly useful tool
It's amazing how your brain rots with a month or so off work..........................
But nothing beats Phil and Fern. Hmmm I miss daytime TV. Still, I might have plenty of time to watch it in a few weeks!
The status quo is that Government hit targets by randomly booting people off incapacity benefit for no reason (my client won her appeal today...woo), and if lie detector tests mean that only the guilty get clobbered then I'm all for it.
The issues I have would be around how accurate the lie detector tests are. Anything less than 100% and that means innocent people will be labelled cheats, and won't be able to defend themselves.