Today there is a comment is free piece by a Liberty lawyer titled "Data matching: a threat to privacy?"
His piece is in three sections, discussing first data matching and its role in identifying single person discount offenders, then data matching and data mining, and finally the right to respect of privacy.
Most relevant to this blog is his discussion of single person discount fraud in the first part of his discussion:
Section 11 of the Local Government Finance Act 1992 provides that the council tax payable for any household will be reduced by 25% if either there is only one person resident there or if there are more than one person resident there but all but one are people who the act says should be disregarded for council tax purposes (including students, people in various types of detention and people defined as "severely mentally impaired"). This 25% discount is commonly referred to as the "single person's discount".My view stands: if you claim concessionary state benefits, accept that confidential data matching will go with the territory.
The Audit Commission is a body charged with ensuring that public money is properly used. Its governing statute, the Audit Commission Act 1998, was amended in 2008 to give it the power to conduct data-matching exercises "for the purposes of assisting in the prevention or detection of fraud." "Data matching" is defined in the act as "the comparison of sets of data to determine how far they match (including the identification of any patterns and trends)" (section 32A of the amended act).
The commission can require certain bodies (including councils) to provide information for the purposes of these exercises and can request information from other bodies. The commission is also required to publish a Code of Data-Matching Practice after consultation, among others, with the Information Commissioner. The code was published last July with an introduction from the Information Commissioner. Paragraph 2.1.5 of the Code makes clear that its scope does not extend to what steps the body required to send in data should take to investigate any possible false claims suggested by the results; that is for them to investigate "in accordance with their usual practices for investigation of fraud and error".
In its recent report on local authorities' attempts to fight fraud, Protecting the Public Purse, the commission points out that 35% of households claim the single person's discount [my emphasis] and that in recent years some councils have noticed a sharp increase in the number of households claiming the discount. It reports on its scrutiny of 11 councils that have taken a proactive approach to combating false claims for the discount and records that most of these reported fraud rates of between 4% and 6%. Applying a 4% rate nationally, it estimates that fraudulent claims for the single person's discount may be costing taxpayers £90m each year.
In the light of this it is perhaps unsurprising that false claims for the single person's discount are one of the targets of the Audit Commission's National Fraud Initiative. The commission's website shows that it is again requiring councils to submit their council tax records and electoral rolls so that the two can be matched. Obviously, the commission will be looking for households claiming the discount where more than one adult is registered to vote.
The report [to one council] shows that the council has 16,700 households claiming the single person's discount. The commission's data-matching threw up 939 "mismatches" (as the report refers to them). Of these, the council managed to account for 269 cases from its own records or home visits. It then wrote to 670 households asking them to account for the discrepancy.
By the time the report was written the council was satisfied that the discount was being properly claimed in 516 of the 670 cases. It is not clear whether the remaining cases were ones where the discount was being incorrectly claimed. Assuming all 154 were, this means that less than 1% of those claiming the single person's discount have been identified by the data-matching exercise as claiming a single person's discount that they were not entitled to. This is far less than the 4% to 6% that the commission refers to in its report. However, this is perhaps not surprising. Data-matching council tax records and the electoral register will only throw up those falsely claiming the single person's discount who are foolish enough to then register more than one adult as electors.
It is also worth noting that, if it is the case that the 154 households of the 939 identified by the data-matching exercise were falsely claiming the discount, this gives the data-matching a hit rate of more than 16%.
1 comments:
Or even better, scrap the single person discounts. Don't forget that some of that data-matching will be used for other, more nefarious purposes.
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