A benefits chief likened to notorious League of Gentlemen character Pauline has unleashed fury after praising managers who pinned up Wild West-style “sheriff stars” encouraging staff to leave the unemployed penniless.

Central England Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) boss Sandra Lambert’s cheerful Twitter post celebrated the “Texas twist” used in Birmingham and Solihull to browbeat employees into sanctioning claimants.

Among the categories depicted by a sheriff’s badge was the rate at which decisions were taken to pull the plug on benefits for those deemed to have “refused employment.”

Ms Lambert, who commentators have compared to jobcentre “restart” officer Pauline Campbell-Jones from hit BBC series The League of Gentlemen, posted an image of the cardboard cut-out stars alongside praise for the Midlands area for “moving performance onwards and upwards.”

The sanctions focus added to mounting evidence that the DWP is operating de-facto targets for the number of people it can strip of benefits for up to six months when they fail to jump through jobcentre hoops.

Some of those hit have been punished for turning up to interviews in the “wrong” clothes, while in one recent case a woman said she had payments suspended after telling a potential employer that she was pregnant.

Former national jobcentre head Neil Couling admitted to MPs earlier this year that offices which imposed sanctions at a lower level than the “norm” faced probes.

Yet the department maintained yesterday that “there are no targets for sanctions.”

A spokesman claimed benefits were only pulled as a last resort “in a tiny percentage of cases where people don’t play by the rules.”

Civil servants’ union PCS, which estimates that over 80,000 claimants have had a collective £20 million in payments stopped over Christmas, said it had complained in the past about the use of “primary school-style motivational charts” to chivvy staff into enacting DWP policies, adding that they did not “have any place in our employment service.”

A PCS spokesman added: “There’s no evidence that sanctions are effective at helping people to find long-term jobs and we think the whole regime should be scrapped.”

Ms Lambert’s image sparked an online storm yesterday, but she has already cemented a reputation through her “zen” management Twitter posts.

Her helpful “motivational” advice includes: “You can’t climb the ladder with your hands in your pockets,” “Resilience is a friend of Freedom,” and “Be that lead goldfish and tell a story.”

Her preference for jargon has seen her dubbed the real-life version of comedy character Pauline.

Embittered Pauline routinely bullied her unfortunate charges, once telling them: “Everything I know about people I learned from pens. If they don’t work, you shake them.

“And if they still don’t work, you chuck them away. Bin ’em.”