Nearly half a million people who claimed Universal Credit could be checked for "fraud or error" a year after they stopped receiving the payments for the benefit from the Department for Work and Pensions (DWP).
MPs on the Public Accounts Committee (PAC) have demanded extra checks on 433,000 people who made new claims during the coronavirus pandemic, but whose cases had ended by January this year.
Since the start of this year, the DWP has been reviewing 927,000 cases it deemed "at particular risk of fraud or error", after relaxing identity checks during Covid, around 11 per cent of the cases had errors, reports Mirror Online.
But on Wednesday, November 17, the cross-party PAC said the exercise did not go far enough and thousands of people should be checked retrospectively over the next nine months.
The PAC said the DWP had "lost a grip" and was "taken by surprise" by the extent of fraud during the pandemic.
PAC chair Meg Hillier added: "This is a real-life waking nightmare for the huge numbers of people affected, from the most vulnerable in our society to the full-time working families who still struggle daily to make ends meet.
"The Department appears unequipped either to properly administer our labyrinthine benefits system or detect and correct years of mistakes."
It comes as the pandemic saw the unemployment rate at 4.8 per cent, with many turning to the government for extra support.
Speaking to Mirror Online, a UK Government spokesperson said: "It is disappointing that the Public Accounts Committee has failed to acknowledge that in the midst of an unprecedented pandemic, we prioritised supporting record numbers of genuine claimants.
"Thanks to this decision, the Universal Credit system stood up to the challenge of the pandemic so people received vital financial support at their time of need.
"We are now taking extensive action to ensure all claims made were genuine.
"Fraud and error in the benefit system is rare, with 95 per cent of benefits worth more than £200bn paid correctly, and just 0.4pc of benefits being overpaid due to DWP error."
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