What happens when the system designed to help you is actually hurting you? This is the question I keep coming back to as I look at the newly released evidence of widespread failings in the disability benefit system. Complaints about the personal independence payment (PIP) assessment process rose by nearly 880% last year, according to the Department for Work and Pensions.

That translates to almost 1,400 people, who might have Parkinson’s or severe depression, put through the government’s flagship disability benefit who – after months of gruelling paperwork, assessments, and perhaps even tribunals – are so desperate that they then find more energy to put in a formal complaint. These can’t be dismissed as being unjustified either: DWP statistics also show that the number of complaints that were upheld rose by 713% in the same year (from 67 in 2015-16 to 545 in 2016-17).

More than 250 PIP claimants have said assessors lied, ignored written evidence and dishonestly reported test results

For the past four years, I’ve been reporting on the radical changes to disability benefits orchestrated by Conservative governments. The lack of humanity is glaring: there’s the Open University student with agoraphobia, Asperger’s and complex mental health problems living without a washing machine, oven or television after benefit cuts left her destitute; the 14-year-old child carer listening to her disabled dad crying because he doesn’t know how he’s going to pay the bills after having his disability benefits taken. But as the DWP’s complaints show, the scandal of this goes even further: there’s increasing evidence that benefits have been removed from disabled people based on entirely fabricated grounds.

The picture that’s emerging should disturb anyone who cares about the welfare state, poverty, or basic government transparency.

The specialist disabled news site Disability News Service (DNS) has been carrying out an investigation into claims of widespread dishonesty in the disability benefit system, with more than 250 PIP claimants alleging assessors repeatedly lied, ignored written evidence and dishonestly reported the results of physical examinations. It’s a regular occurrence for disabled readers to show me the reports of their benefit assessment, point to a statement, and tell me that it never in fact happened.

Even the latest official independent review of PIPs this March found there was “inherent distrust” of the system, due to the “lack of transparency in the assessment process” and the scale of faulty decisions (four out of five cases where a disabled person is denied disability benefits are now overturned on appeal).

Almost 80% of disabled people put through the PIP test have seen their health deteriorate due to stress or anxiety, a major survey found last month. More than a third of those who have had their benefit cut said they were struggling to pay for food, rent and bills. Forty per cent had become more isolated, and more than 50,000 disabled people have had their Motability cars removed after undergoing the PIP test.

None of this exists in a vacuum. Due to the fact the government is undertaking multiple cuts to disability services at once, many of the disabled people facing the PIP assessment have also simultaneously been forced through the notorious “fit to work” tests (often several times in the space of a few years) and/or then had their money sanctioned. Talk to them about the reality of the disability benefit system in this country and it largely invokes a response of distrust, anger and fear. It isn’t hard to see why. As well as allegations of fabricated reports, secret filming has produced claims of a culture of targets, in which assessors are allegedly monitored to ensure they don’t find excessive numbers of disabled people eligible for sickness benefits, and mounting evidence of toxic punitive measures. As one former jobcentre adviser put it when describing her role with benefit claimants, there were “brownie points for cruelty”.

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Cruelty can be lucrative. The two private firms hired by the government to carry out the PIP assessments – Atos and Capita – have been handed more than £500m in taxpayers’ money between 2013 and 2016. This is despite year-long delays, administrative chaos, and thousands of wrong decisions.

For any government-run system to be riddled with at best inaccuracy and at worst outright dishonesty, would be cause for serious concern. But that this is a system that’s charged with providing a safety net for some of the most disabled and severely ill people in this country makes it sickening.

By 2018, around 3 million disabled people will be put through PIP assessments. The result for many will decide whether they can eat regular meals, leave the house and pay for medical equivalent. The government must not only launch an independent investigation into the assessment process, including allegations of dishonesty, but urgently act on any subsequent recommendations. As it stands, the evidence is mounting: there is something rotten in Britain’s disability benefit system.

• Frances Ryan writes the Guardian’s Hardworking Britain series