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Harrow Council adopts ‘zero tolerance’ fraud strategy using Civica Fraud software
5.00am at a Civic centre in Harrow and UK Border Agency and Corporate Anti-Fraud Team (CAFT) officers arrest nine people as part of a contractor fraud investigation for Harrow Council in North West London. Despite what the papers say, benefit fraud is not the only type of fraud that local authorities are tackling.
Fraud costs the UK taxpayer an estimated £30 billion each year with local authorities alone taking a £684 million hit, according to Government figures. Councils are under increasing pressure to tackle fraud, partly because it is on the rise during the current economic climate and as a result of the increasing challenges set by the Comprehensive Area Assessment (CAA) and linked use of resources assessments.
Harrow Council is a three star local authority under the CAA ratings, the second most improved council in London, and one of only a few to improve their performance recently. The authority delivers a four star benefits service, of which CAFT feeds into the security elements of the service for fraud prevention, detection and investigation.
Headed by Corporate Anti-Fraud Service manager, Justin Philips, with just seven people in his anti-fraud team, which is around half of what other London’s Boroughs employ on average, Harrow punches above its weight in tackling this type of criminal activity using Civica Fraud software. As well as benefit offences the team has to investigate all types of fraud involving the authority and customer fraud, contractor fraud, employee fraud and member fraud
Phase one
Set up in 2006 to investigate corporate fraud in addition to benefit fraud, the team quickly realised that there were areas of fraud affecting other parts of the authority that were slipping through the net because of the traditional focus on benefit fraud.
Justin Phillips the team manager at Harrow Council said: "To make the case for expanding the team's focus from benefits to a corporate-wide approach to tackling fraud across the council and its departments, we needed senior management buy-in. The NFI programme expansion and increased emphasis on The Use of Resources, Key Lines of Enquiry (KLOE) demonstrated the need to take a more consistent corporate approach to fraud, rather than focusing on one particular area such as benefits. This was backed up by our external auditing. As a result, the council’s senior management team was able to see the need for the proposed strategy."
To make the new corporate approach work, CAFT defined its roles, responsibilities and authority to investigate within the organisation and established partnerships with various service areas including internal audit with the common aim of tackling fraud. At the same time, CAFT set up a technology infrastructure including Civica Anti-Fraud software which drew on data from different parts of the organization into a warehouse which gave the team access to real time intelligence about individuals that had relationships with different services. It allowed the team to look across investigations that ordinarily would have been missed. The team is now able to do comparisons across departments while respecting Data Protection Act (DPA) protocols – they only share data that is critical to making a case.
Phase two
To bring staff up to speed, CAFT identified skills and knowledge gaps which needed to be addressed for using the new technology and investigating wider fraud and training was then delivered. The CAFT also increased awareness across the council itself that they were investigating all types of fraud and that a new regime was in place. Any fraud cases cracked were given increased publicity and a ‘zero tolerance’ culture was fostered to deter dishonest and criminal activity across the organisation and the wider community.
Justin Phillips said: "In the past, our processes too singularly focused and we had low deterrents against fraudulent activity outside of benefit fraud. By making people aware we were looking at all types of fraud internally, we got our house in order and in turn our citizens gained more confidence in what we were doing. We looked at everything that NFI exercise was dredging up and proactively focused on areas like housing, recruitment, disabled blue badges where we knew we could achieve significant results.”
Phase three
Because its resources were limited, the CAFT team concentrated first on identifying problems in service area application processes as a starting point. The team ensured that it was made clear in all major application processes that anyone entering false or misleading information would be brought to account in line with the zero tolerance approach. This set in place the foundations for any further action that the team proposed to take.
Through proactively assessing service areas most at risk across the council, the CAFT team was able to assign resources accordingly to tackle fraudulent behaviour, while constantly reviewing and feeding back information centrally and cross-referencing linked cases or people across different service areas.
“The constant review of our work and results using Civica's software as a central resource meant that we quickly saw where we were winning and what actions made the biggest difference in terms of tackling fraud. The software also gives us an audit trail for all our investigations, demonstrating our internal processes are up to standard if a case has to go to court.”
Results
Despite facing legislative constraints in that the CAFT team has no statutory authority to access evidence on corporate fraud cases as it does in benefit fraud cases, plus access to data and the sharing of data internally is restricted, the council has achieved significant and high profile results:
· 28 employees have been dismissed, disciplined or resigned as a result of fraud investigations in the last four years, 5 of the 28 were successfully prosecuted and two served prison sentences.
· Joint audits with Internal Audit on blue badge allocations, housing assessment and housing management.
· Success under the 08/09 NFI with eight employees removed from post for ‘overstaying’ their immigration time, prompting tighter council human resource controls on appointing those with limited leave or visa status.
· Successfully prosecuted and cautioned individuals for blue badge fraud, student finance fraud, housing assessment, housing management, identity fraud and employee theft
Justin Phillips added: "Following the success of targeting particular areas, in 2010 and 2011 CAFT will continue to focus on areas deemed to be at high risk to fraud such as benefit fraud, social care direct payments, tenancy fraud, blue badge fraud and employment.
"Through demonstrating quick results in one service area and communicating a zero tolerance message, we believe we are achieving more with fewer resources which is helped in a large part by using Civica's Fraud software as a central resource for collection and analysis of fraud data."
