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
Work Capability Assessment advised the government on back-to-work policy between 2006 and 2016. She said of the WCA: "I don't think anyone thinks it has been a success". Conversely, the DWP has said that a group of experts — a professor of psychiatry, a consultant psychiatrist in learning disability, a professor of rheumatology, and an expert in human resources — reviewed the WCA in 2013 and concluded that "the WCA produced consistent results on the whole, and is an accurate indicator of work capability compared with expert opinion". But in the year that the study was published, the firms running back-to-work training for