Our 'Protecting the public purse' reports describe what's happened in the field of fraud detection and prevention and identify fraud risks. We also describe the action taken by some councils to tackle fraud and provide links to tools to help councils improve their counter-fraud defences.
Protecting the public purse 2011
We have now published Protecting the public purse 2011: Fighting fraud against local government, we highlight some emerging fraud issues and review councils’ progress in tackling the significant risks described in our 2009 and 2010 PPP reports. We show that:
- housing tenancy fraud could cost the public purse £900 million each year (NFA estimate);
- councils detected more than £22 million of false claims for student and single person council tax discounts;
- housing and council tax benefits fraud losses accounted for more than half of the total fraud losses detected by councils;3 Protecting the public purse 2011 Audit Commission
- counter-fraud professionals increasingly recognise abuse of personal budgets in adult social care as a fraud risk for councils; and
- councils detected 145 cases of procurement fraud amounting to £14.6 million.