Committee
Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee 01 June 2017
01 Jun 2017 · S5 · Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee
Item of business
National Fraud Initiative
Yvonne Douglas (South Lanarkshire Council)
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I support much of what my colleagues have already said. We make extensive use of the NFI exercise, and we welcome as many public bodies as possible participating in it, because that increases the data sets—and therefore the matches—that come to us. As a local authority, we can risk assess the matches when they come back to us and prioritise them. I accept that we might increase the matches if we included more public bodies, but we would then apply our own local risk assessment to those that we would consider prioritising for investigation. The point has been made that, with constraints on our resources, we need to consider that when the matches are returned to us. We have identified HMRC as a body with which we are particularly interested in matching data, because we believe that that would pull out possible conflicts of interest. We have been interested in that over the past couple of years, particularly in relation to our procurement arrangements, and we are trying to strengthen our internal arrangements in that regard. We would welcome the opportunity to match against HMRC data because that would give us something else to allow us to independently check what our employees are already declaring to us. 09:15
In the same item of business
The Acting Convener (Jackie Baillie)
Lab
Welcome to the 15th meeting in 2017 of the Public Audit and Post-legislative Scrutiny Committee. I ask everybody to make sure that their electronic devices a...
Brian Muldoon (Aberdeen City Council)
We have been involved in the national fraud initiative since it started, and we believe that it is important to tackle fraud within public authorities. We li...
The Acting Convener
Lab
I was looking for whether the legislation is clear about which bodies should take part in the initiative, how they should do so and whether participation is ...
Brian Muldoon
I believe that all public bodies should participate in the initiative; after all, public money is involved. I know that there seemed to be issues with univer...
The Acting Convener
Lab
I do not know whether Elaine Greaves or Heather Mohieddeen wants to take on that question. I am asking principally about what the existing legislation covers...
Elaine Greaves (Midlothian Council)
It is very important that participation should be compulsory, because the more organisations that take part, the more the value of doing so is increased. The...
The Acting Convener
Lab
Does Heather Mohieddeen have anything to add to that?
Heather Mohieddeen (Midlothian Council)
No—I have nothing to add.
Atholl Scott (Moray Council)
From a Moray Council perspective, the NFI should be compulsory. We have dealt with it for a number of rounds now, and all local authorities participate, unde...
Yvonne Douglas (South Lanarkshire Council)
I support much of what my colleagues have already said. We make extensive use of the NFI exercise, and we welcome as many public bodies as possible participa...
The Acting Convener
Lab
We turn to questions from members, starting with Colin Beattie.
Colin Beattie (Midlothian North and Musselburgh) (SNP)
SNP
I am interested in Audit Scotland’s submission, as this is the first time that I have seen reference to “real time, pre transaction checking”. I did not kn...
Brian Muldoon
We are aware of the facility on the website to allow us to do it. There is certainly an argument that, if we do checks at the beginning of a claim, we can pe...
Colin Beattie
SNP
Is it a significant cost?
Brian Muldoon
I did not bring the print-out with me.
Elaine Greaves
I think the cost of the check is about £300.
Brian Muldoon
There is a scale. If you do more checks, it is better value, but I cannot remember the costs just now. As Atholl Scott said, councils have deadlines for ben...
Colin Beattie
SNP
Do others have views?
Atholl Scott
You are talking about a preventative measure. It is interesting that the people who are involved in the councils are generally auditors, and auditors tend to...
Colin Beattie
SNP
Okay. I was interested because I had not seen reference to real-time checking before. We have talked about the possibility that, given the scope of the NFI,...
Yvonne Douglas
I think the end result would just be that we had more matches. The matches run into the thousands. We are trying to make sure that they are good matches, whi...
Colin Beattie
SNP
If housing associations, for example, were included, what would be the cost implications for local authorities?
Yvonne Douglas
In South Lanarkshire Council, we are the facilitators, so we do not do the investigation. We co-ordinate the upload of data to Audit Scotland and then we fac...
Colin Beattie
SNP
I am still looking at the implications of the matching process. Would mandatory follow-ups of matches improve things?
Atholl Scott
I would say definitely not. In my submission, I indicated that it is absolutely essential that public bodies participate in the process. The requirement on u...
Colin Beattie
SNP
You would not favour mandatory follow-ups.
Atholl Scott
I would not favour mandatory follow-ups of all matches.
Colin Beattie
SNP
Does anyone disagree with that?
Brian Muldoon
I do not disagree. I echo Atholl Scott’s point. I do not see any benefit from a specific deadline. We have to remember that the volume of matches that come ...
Colin Beattie
SNP
Does a year not seem an extraordinary length of time?