Woman claimed dead mum's pension

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A woman who claimed £10,000 on her dead mother's pension has been given a suspended jail term.

Hansaben Patel, 51, of Cwmgors in the Amman Valley, told fraud investigators she was unaware her mother had died.

But inquiries showed she continued to claim the money for 18 months after flying to America for the funeral.

The former postmistress, who admitted theft, was told to repay all the money and carry out 100 hours community work by a judge at Swansea Crown Court.

Carl Harrison, for the Department of Work & Pensions, said Patel's parents had moved to the US some time before her mother Shantaben Patel died in America in 2005.

Her daughter carried on claiming her combined pension and carer attendance allowance amounting to £9,678 over 18 months.

Joint account

She came under investigation after Work and Pensions investigators received an anonymous tip off and fraud investigators used new powers to make inquiries into Patel's movements through the American Immigration Service.

She was interviewed in March 2007, one month after the pension cash payment stopped.

Mr Harrison said that when confronted Patel claimed she was unaware her mother had died at the time she was claiming the pension.

"She claimed that she only discovered that her mother had died when her father returned from the USA in January 2007," he told the court.

He said that during the interview she had acknowledged that she knew the pension payments would stop with the death of her mother.

The court heard that all the money had been paid into a joint account opened by the mother and daughter.

Mr Harrison said that Patel initially claimed her mother had died in August 2006.

'Good daughter'

Inquiries with the American Immigration Service established that her mother had died one year before, he said.

Patel also claimed that she had not attended her mother's funeral, but similar inquiries showed she had flown to America two days after her mother's death.

In mitigation Claire Templeman said that Patel had continued claiming the money for her elderly father and had not benefited herself.

Sentencing her to 32 weeks in prison, suspended for a year, Judge Mark Furness said: "It is quite clear that she is a hard-working person and a good daughter to her parents.

"She has run businesses and earned her living and she has been an honest woman but she has now committed an offence of dishonesty."