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Needle in a haystack

Martin Rosenbaum | 10:31 UK time, Tuesday, 13 June 2006

An interesting this morning on the Today programme based on documents the 91Èȱ¬ obtained using FOI.

It seems that Revenue staff were paying tax credits to immigrants who weren't entitled to them, because they were told to ignore the fact that a claimant didn't meet residency rules as long as he or she had a national insurance number.

It also provides one interesting sidelight on using FOI. FOI users often complain about not getting any information, but occasionally it can almost be the reverse.

In this case the government helpfully supplied a pile of paperwork about six inches high, with several hundred pages of guidance to officials dealing with tax credit applications. Somewhere in the middle was the memo in question.

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