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Councillors: Arun

Answer

This is an operational matter for the Audit Commission and I have asked the chief executive of the Audit Commission to write to the hon. Member direct.Letter from Steve Bundred, dated January 2009:"Your Parliamentary Question on what reasons the Audit Commission has requested councillors of Arun Council to provide details of their personal bank accounts has been passed to me for reply.""This matter relates to the data collected for the Audit Commission's data matching exercise, known as the National Fraud Initiative (NFI). The NFI is designed to assist in the prevention and detection of fraud and is one of the ways in which the Audit Commission meets its responsibility of promoting economy, efficiency and effectiveness in the use of public money. We estimate that since it started in 1996 the NFI has helped to detect around £450 million in fraud and overpayments.""The processing of data by the Commission in a data matching exercise is now carried out under powers in Part 2A of the Audit Commission Act 1998, which were enacted in the Serious Crime Act 2007. The Audit Commission does not itself investigate instances of fraud; this is the responsibility of the bodies participating in the NFI and supplying data sets for matching.""Mandatory participants such as local councils, police authorities, probation boards, fire and rescue authorities and NHS bodies are required to submit a number of different dataset types for NFI. One of these datasets is payroll data, that is, all individuals currently being paid a salary/wage/members allowance on a payroll at a particular point in time.""The data sought is limited strictly to those fields that are required for data matching plus any that will assist the investigator in selecting matches where an inconsistency is indicated from the data match that requires further investigation. The fields are set out in a 'data specification'. The bank account and sort code are included on the payroll data specification; however the name in which the bank account is held is not collected so the Audit Commission cannot make a connection to other account holders.""Bank details (bank account number and sort code) are important for the investigation process, but they are not displayed in the reports that NFI participants receive; instead the matching process looks at whether the bank account number and sort code is the ""same or different across the sets of data provided for NFI and then converts this information into a flag (Yes or No). It is then the flag that is included in the NFI reports. This intelligence helps investigators prioritise investigative resources on cases where employment income has, for example, potentially been withheld (e.g. in an undeclared bank account). This data is highly significant in the fight against fraud.""The Audit Commission's Head of NFI has met elected members at Arun Council to explain why these fields are collected, referring to a number of case studies that not only involve public sector employees but also elected members who have been guilty of benefit fraud by not declaring allowances.""A copy of this letter will be placed in Hansard."

Secondary information

Type

Written question

Reference

486 c1072-3W; 246374

Session

2008-09

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Subjects

Councillors Arun

Link

View this Written question on www.publications.parliament.uk