More than 200,000 people have wrongly faced investigation for housing benefit fraud and error after the performance of a government algorithm fell far short of expectations, the Guardian can reveal.
Two-thirds of claims flagged as potentially high risk by a Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) automated system over the last three years were in fact legitimate, official figures released under freedom of information laws show.
It means thousands of UK households every month have had their housing benefit claims unnecessarily investigated based on the faulty judgment of an algorithm that wrongly identified their claims as high risk.