A boxer should have hung up his gloves if he really had the illness that allowed him to claim social benefits: impaired vision.

A trade fair participant who regularly advertised his business in a magazine still received an invalidity pension and sickness assistance benefits amounting to over €76,000, even though his trading activity was in excess of €3.5 million.

Benefits were also received by a boxer who claimed to be visually impaired and another trader who was caught effecting transactions running into millions of euros.

These are just three of the cases of social benefit fraud revealed by the Auditor General in a performance audit report which takes the Department of Social Security to task over its inadequate and inconsistent approach to cases of proven fraud.

It held that payment of social security benefits to persons who were not eligible for such payments was detrimental to the taxpayer and to those persons who were in real need of social benefits.

The report, covering the period 2010 to 2012, also noted that government expenditure on social security benefits represented one of its major items of expenditure. This amounted to €783 million in 2012, accounting for 11.6 per cent of Malta’s Gross Domestic Product and more than 30 per cent of the total recurrent expenditure incurred by the government.

The NAO also referred to the fact that it had already given its opinion on existing flaws in the system of institutional checks and balances through which social cases were regulated.

While the Benefit Fraud and Investigation Department provided clear and indisputable evidence on persons who did not need social assistance, enabling the Department of Social Security to suspend benefits immediately, the latter’s actions were “grossly inadequate”.

The Department of Social Security disregarded proof acquired by the investigators and relied on a letter written by the lawyer of the beneficiary.

This, according to the NAO, was not commendable as such an action manifested the Department of Social Security’s failure to uniformly apply requirements establishing the desired level of proof when deciding particular cases.

It concluded that such action was tantamount to the adoption of double standards whereby the Benefit Fraud and Investigation Department was tasked with providing irrefutable evidence while the beneficiary must only have his or her lawyer draft a letter of complaint for the action of that department to be rescinded.

In certain cases, benefits were only suspended following an examination conducted by the Department of Social Security’s medical panel, which in light of the obvious nature of evidence presented, raised doubts on the necessity of the medical panels in such cases.

The NAO also reported that the Management Committee was inconsistent in adjudicating similar cases for invalidity pension, deeming evidence insufficient in one case and the same type of evidence sufficient in a similar case.

The granting of other means-tested benefits to high risk beneficiaries, with only basic vetting carried out, following rigorously detailed irregularities identified in investigations, was not conducive to good governance.