WAR FRAUDS AT HOME.

New Zealand Herald, Volume LII, Issue 16051, 18 October 1915, Page 5

WAR FRAUDS AT HOME.

SOLDIERS AND EARNINGS.

[from our own correspondent]

London, September 1. The liberal allowances made to soldiers' wives have produced a great increase in the marriage rate and also a generous crop of cases of personation and fraud, which the Government is now setting about to correct. One of the most fruitful causes of trouble is the false statements which are made by soldiers as to their earnings before they enlisted and the amount they were in trie habit of paving to their mothers for board. In the Court the other day counsel for the Public Prosecutor said there would be stores more of these cases brought before the Woolwich magistrate in the near future. There were hundreds of cases in which the money had actually been obtained in this way, and thousands more in which such attempts were made all over the country, and it was very necessary to stamp it out.

The magistrate said the separation allowances had been given on a most lavish scale, far in excess of what had been intended, and in many cases, he was sorry to say, the money was not used as it should have been. The duty of magistrates was to deal most severely with women who did that sort of thing when the resources of the country were already so heavily taxed.

In one case a boy of 14, who had given his age as 18 when he joined the army, said his wages before the war was 18s "a week, and that he allowed his mother 10s. Actually his maximum earnings had been 9s 9d a week, and sometimes he only received 4s 6d. The mother gave the "same figures in tilling up her application form for the separation allowance. She was fined £3. and the boy £1. In another case the man asserted that he had been earning £4 a week as a horsedealer, and paying his old mother £2 10s regularly, while the police reported that he had " earned a precarious livelihood by-the larcenv of chickens and the robbing of drunken men." In some, cases men, who have been lodgers, and until their enlistment never thought of their landladies in any but a business relationship, have suddenly discovered that they were their " foster mothers," and were therefore entitled to what they had received as their weeklv rent.