So, just how do fishing trips in search of Section 11 discount fraud work?
We are used to watching TV programmes in which a person is, say, murdered. Somebody finds the body. The police investigate. Clues are found. Suspect lists are compiled. Some suspects are eliminated, possibly because of a cast iron alibi. Finger prints may not match. The DNA may be wrong. Surveillance may be used. Phones may be tapped. Interrogations take place. These focus not just on behaviour but on motives, which may of course, be crucial in deciding criminality itself. Was there malice aforethought? People may be asked to ‘explain’ suspicious evidence. Evidence is found to link suspects with a particular crime.
Discount fraud investigations are nothing like this. Evidence that a crime has taken place is the end point and not the starting point of the investigation. One investigator involved with an NFI approved pilot put this very well: in response to a complaint about being falsely subjected to a fraud investigation, he replied that until the investigation was completed nobody knew whether or not it was a fraud investigation. Those who have been subjected to such experiences often share their experiences. What happens is by now fairly well known. Sometimes it is so horrific that it makes the local news. The well known case of Tessa Munt MP, a wholly entitled and well behaved person who appears to have had the misfortune to live in an area where the council lacks even the most basic legal knowledge and common sense, is an example in point.
The difference between the two situations is that the first is an investigation to solve a specific crime, whereas the second is an investigation in search of particular crimes on the basis that crime is out there somewhere to be found. One is an investigation of a crime; the other is a fishing trip in search of crime.
Most of us would agree that some people dishonestly pretend to live alone in order to receive a council tax discount. Maybe when they first ask the council to deduct 25% they lie about who lives in their house. Maybe they tell the truth in the first place, but then later conceal the fact that somebody who cancels their right to the discount has moved in. So how do you find these people?
The answer: you use statistics, logic, and the vast amounts of personal data which the state and the private sector collect about all of us all the time. You also use a great deal of misinformation to conceal, even it would appear from Secretaries of State and Government Departments, exactly what you are doing.
Some Section 11 fishing trips makes use of two particular sets of data: information provided by people applying to borrow money, which includes their address, and information provided to electoral registration officers on the annual electoral registration form. It is an example of the merging of state held data and data held by the private sector.
Other Section 11 fishing trips make use of data on council tax office computers and data on electoral registration offices.
Electoral Registration Officers collect personal data in order to administer democracy. You can register to vote at more than one address - though of course you can only vote once in any election. Students are often registered at more than one address. Other examples would be people with two homes, and people who work away at home and live at temporary addresses. Electoral registration officers are separate from the council itself, which strictly speaking may not make any use of the register except for specified statutory purposes. So in using electoral register information for council tax purposes the council and the NFI have to argue that this is a statutory purpose related to law enforcement and crime prevention. What ‘related’ to means in legal terms in this context has never been thrashed out in a court of law. (But for what happens to people on the NFI hit lists to be legal it has to be legal to use the electoral register as the basis or trigger for issuing a council tax bill for money that people do not owe because they meet the criteria set out in council tax law.)
Banks and shops collect personal information when you ask for a loan or credit, and they give it to credit reference companies.
Businesses are not allowed to use the electoral register to send you junk mail, as a court decided that this was an invasion of data privacy. This is a decision which the data merchants dislike intensely and have tried to get overturned ever since. There is big money to be made from the personal data on the electoral register.
But credit reference companies such as Experian and also have legal access to the full electoral register. They can use this to vet applications for loans. If you are not on the electoral register at the address you put on your loan application form, your credit reference application will be refused.
The two court decisions in which these uses of the electoral register were thrashed out are both called ‘Robertson Cases’.
Although the NFI is fond of saying how sophisticated its data matching techniques are, this particular set of techniques is relatively simple. Anybody with a home computer and a data base could set up a similar query on their own system.
What happens is that the computer is asked for a list of houses where a) a 25% discount has been deducted b) only one person is on the council tax data base and c) more than one adult, or one adult and a 16 year old or 17, is on the electoral register. In producing these hit lists, personal data relating to more or less every adult and most 16 and 17 year olds in the country is fed into the computer and searched through. It is, of course, perfectly legal to be in receipt of a 25% discount in this situation. There is absolutely nothing wrong in this situation in itself.
But the search for fraud has been narrowed down significantly. Out of the whole population of the country, we have a short-list of about 880,000 people, shared out among the local councils who collect the tax. They get so many each to investigate, ranging from about 400 up to 5,000.
All these households are reported as what the NFI calls ‘hits’ - though it appears to be a bit embarrassed about doing this - and local councils are ‘required’ or ‘expected’ to investigate every single one. At this point, a new piece of personal data has been created relating to these 880,000 people, data which itself might be bought and sold and passed on. They have been on an NFI ‘hit’ list and involved in a fraud investigation. This fact itself triggers new rights to access personal data about hit list victims from more or less anybody who might have it. Is Suspect B on benefits? Whose car is registered where? So their privacy is more and more deeply invaded. It is sometimes suggested that these investigations should be done in a ‘sensitive’ manner. This is not to avoid distressing the innocent people who are falsely suspected of fraud, but because they are suspected of fraud. There is no point in warning your suspects that you suspect them. They might take evasive action and escape detection.
The aim of these fraud investigations is to find second adults who are not disregarded, and in a situation where the liable adult understood this and behaved dishonestly in order to get a discount.
But the ‘hit’ lists are still relatively large, and as yet there is nothing in the way of evidence. This does not appear to prevent some councils from cancelling the discount. And of course threats to do just this, whether or not you are still entitled under Section 11 are crucial in what happens next. So, of course, are long distance interrogation techniques by letter, or what are sometimes incorrectly called ‘review’ letters. The NFI helpfully provides model investigation letters for use by councils.
In a brilliant reversal of years of tradition, the suspects, who are only in this investigation on statistical grounds, are then required to prove their innocence and eliminate themselves from the investigation leaving a smaller and more probably fraudulent sub set for further investigation.
