Ministers are to set out options for reforming the benefits system and moving people from welfare into work.
Work and Pensions Secretary Iain Duncan Smith says he wants radical reform to tackle a "culture of worklessness" and help the least well-off in society.
Proposals set to be included in a green paper include combining existing benefits and tax credits and tailoring support to parents and the disabled.
Labour have questioned whether the plans will lead to cuts elsewhere.
Mr Duncan Smith suggested last month that the government had a "once-in-a-generation" opportunity to tackle "entrenched" welfare dependency, unemployment and poverty in parts of the UK.
'Trapped on benefits'
He has said it is a scandal that there are five million people on out of work benefits and that nearly 1.5 million have been on benefits for nine out of the last 10 years.
Ministers want to remove disincentives in the tax system to finding work, making sure that claimants do not find themselves worse off when starting a job than while on benefits, which they say is often the case under current arrangements.
This could see people in work having their benefits withdrawn at a single set rate and this process being tapered to leave them better off than before.
In advance of the consultation document being published, Mr Duncan Smith told the BBC it was his aim to make people in work "better off, and their families better-off, than they would be out of work and on benefits".
"The objective is to improve the quality of life for the worst off in society and get those at the bottom end back into work... and get more children out of child poverty," he said. "There is still a culture of worklessness, feeling trapped on benefits. That will change."
'Pitfalls and traps'
Years of "piecemeal reform" had resulted in a system that was "complex" and inefficient, he said.
The BBC's political correspondent David Thompson said ministers wanted to simplify the system by rolling existing benefits and tax credits into a single personalised, universal credit.
"The system we are talking about will make the benefit system much simpler. It will make it easier to understand. They will be able, for themselves, to calculate how going to work, or doing extra hours in work, will pay," Mr Duncan Smith added.
"So they will benefit, not just by money, they will benefit because they will now understand a system which has become incomprehensible to most of them and full of pitfalls and traps and different hours of work which you have to, really, be some sort of brilliant mathematician to understand."
The cost of the programme was estimated at £3bn when the Conservatives were in opposition, but Mr Duncan Smith said the actual cost would not be revealed at this stage but would be included in the white paper, due to be published in the autumn.
He refused to be drawn on how much it would cost to set-up, but said that in the long-term there would be "significant savings" with more people in work and paying tax and a simplified, less bureaucratic system.
"This is not about inventing new money. It is about saying, look, the present system is expensive. It's excessive because it wastes money."
Labour have questioned whether the plans are affordable and may result in cuts in welfare provision elsewhere.
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