Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment awarded, Atos said: In August, the whistleblower expanded on his allegations in a first-hand account published by the "British Medical Journal". He suggested that the DWP's alleged actions might have been at least partly driven by pressure to "reduce government debt". The DWP's senior doctors made no reply but the clinical director of Atos did respond. In relation to the claim that some Atos assessors had been led to interpret the test's criteria too harshly, she did not deny that the "bogus rules of thumb" had been used in training talks but she said that assessors were expected to follow
Incapacity Benefit sickness benefits; although a government-run eligibility test was brought in alongside Incapacity Benefit in 1995, critics said that officials still accepted too many claims using information supplied by the claimants themselves and their GPs without asking for an All Work Test to be performed, partly because the pool of medical assessors was relatively small and partly because doctors' time was costly - which was why large numbers of nurses were brought in to perform the new test introduced in 2008. Welfare reformers said that once claimants had been granted Incapacity Benefit they became "trapped" in the system. In fact, there