Criticism of the Work Capability Assessment, used by the Department for Work and Pensions in the United Kingdom, to assess and reassess claimants of Employment and Support Allowance or enhanced rate Universal Credit, has been wide-ranging, from the procedure itself, to the financial cost of using both Atos and Maximus to assess claimants. Other criticisms discuss the level of deaths, suicides and high overturn rates at tribunals that the WCA has caused. Criticism of Atos Quality issues with Atos On 22 July 2013, the DWP announced that it had recently "directed" Atos to "put in place a quality improvement plan following a DWP audit which identified an unacceptable reduction in the quality of written reports produced following assessments." The statutory independent report for parliament on the operational performance of the WCA in 2013 dealt with the 'quality improvement plan' in one sentence: The DWP said it had carried out an unscheduled and "urgent" audit in "April/May 2013" that looked at reports written over the six months to March, in which time Atos had furnished the DWP with more than 300,000 reports. The DWP said it had found 164 reports that its in-house medical staff had said had scored only a 'C' for quality. However, during the period in question, the 164 reports had been deemed adequate by the department's on-the-ground decision-makers, who had used them to decide on claimants' entitlement to ESA — unacceptable reports are returned to the outsourcer for what the DWP calls "a rework". The department's press release tried to explain the paradox: High cost of Atos contract The Public Accounts Committee of MPs chaired by Margaret Hodge heard evidence that over the previous financial year, Atos had been paid £112million to carry out 738,000 assessments. At that time, 38% of appeals to tribunals were successful and the committee's view was that too many wrong decisions were being made, only for the decisions to be overturned later (while Atos was paid by the DWP, it was the Ministry of Justice that paid for the tribunal appeals, with £500 million being the potential cost of these appeals over ten years). Hodge said that the DWP got "far too many decisions wrong on claimants' ability to work...at considerable cost to the taxpayer" and added that this can "create misery and hardship to the claimants themselves". She also remarked: "We saw no evidence that the Department was applying sufficient rigour