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The Pamphlet Collection of Sir Robert Stout: Volume 75

The Investigation of Claims

The Investigation of Claims.

From this point I naturally pass to another part of the Bill which is almost as vital as the preceding. I mean the machinery clauses. All the claims are to be transmitted to the magistrate for the district, who shall "fully investigate" the same, and in investigating it he may or may not require the personal attendance of the applicant (clause 18). That is practically the sum total of the provisions under this head. Now, a magistrate is a judicial and not a detective officer; he has no detective staff at his disposal, nor does the Bill give him one, or indeed any special staff whatever. No provision is made for any departmental investigation before the matter comes into court; no officer or person is given any standing in the court; the whole business is ex parte, and the value of an ex parte investigation covering a period of twenty (and possibly sixty-five) years, before a tribunal which has absolutely no independent means of knowledge, is obvious. It is much as though the Assessment Courts had to decide all questions before them after hearing the taxpayers' side of the case only, and without even the written valuation of the Tax Department as a check. The temptations to fraud which such a loose procedure holds out will be as irresistible to a needy claimant as the claim will be to the unhappy taxpayer; and the colossal swindles in connection with the United States war pensions, one-half of which, amounting in 1892 to nearly 80,000,000dol, are estimated to be the reward of fraud and not valor, may well find a humble but exact parallel here. To erect such flimsy machinery to meet the inevitable pressure is a direct incitement to fraud.