Auditor gets diminishing returns from data matching
Audit Scotland's second major comparison of public sector databases has identified 36 per cent less fraud than its first attempt. The 2006-07 National Fraud Initiative, which started in October 2006 and involved 74 organisations, found £9.7m of fraud, compared with £15.1m identified by the same exercise in 2004-05, according to …
This sort of data sharing is laudable and should happen on a far more frequent basis. I have never understood why people bleat about privacy concerns when there are people who exploit the gaps in data sharing to claim benefits when they are working and work in schools when they have 'out of borough' social services involvements.
I have several national insurance numbers and several slightly different first names. Not because I am a criminal mastermind, it's more a case of public servants with terminal cases of fat fingers, possibly because I am one of them filthy foreigners too.
As a result, one of my evil doubles is receiving very threatening letters from HMRC (and from its spin-off for self-employed phantom workers) where he used to live several years ago.
On different occasions, said evil double spent some time trying to explain the notion of "errors in your database" to a number of well-meaning but public-service-thick call centre drones, only to witness them go through funny (but unsettling) infinite loops.
Evil double (that doesn't want SOCA in his living room) wants to know if this auditor dude can be contacted somewhere. Thanks, he says.
the NAO that illegally requested 25million records from HMRC, which then disappeared, but weren't lost by TNT because nobody could prove anything?
"Audit Scotland said that data for these exercises must now be uploaded by public sector bodies to a secure website set up in autumn 2007, rather than sent by disc" - ooo somebody is learning.
