The Audit Commission has published a 'Public Briefing' on the Local Audit and Accountability Bill including the data matching provisions.
It mentions the need for transparency and accountability, which, given the misinformation it has provided to the Dept for Communities about its own activities and its tendency to refuse to provide information at the drop of a hat had me laughing out loud. A body which misleads judges about council tax discount law at F of I tribunal directions hearings is on weak ground when calling for accountability, and appears to revel in its own lack of accountability (AKA independence from government perhaps).
The Audit Commission cannot even provide Audit Guides on council taxation law which correctly represent the statute, regulatory and case law on the topic and does not understand the full electoral register which it uses to categorise hundreds of thousands of perfectly innocent people whose situation is fully regular as potential frauds (though it lies about doing this if pressed).
The NFI appears to be proud of 'Protecting the Public Purse' which it has used to disseminate misinformation for years, especially about council tax discounts. It wants something similar to continue and draws people's attention to it in their public briefing. One can see why they want similar stuff to happen in the future, but it will be harder I think for the Cabinet Office to get away with publishing false information about taxpayers that it was for the Commission because it is nearer to accountability, unlike the Audit Commission which appears to be accountable to nobody. Of course, using a public briefing to direct people to a source of misleading and prejudicial information about incorrectly claimed or awarded discounts is a good strategy if you want to mislead the public and electors. I suppose they want to go out in the same way they lived, on a wave of misinformation.
This comments that not all of the Commission's activities arise from data matching powers but some of them arise from the powers of auditors to test systems for fraud and error. These powers were of course those relied upon by the Audit Commission in its incompetent and fallacious arguments for auditors getting access to the full electoral register. It argued (though it now denies this, despite still doing it) that by comparing council tax data sets providing details of discounts being 'claimed' by taxpayers with the full electoral register the auditor could find evidence of error: if the discount was right then the electoral register had to be wrong.
This is the position still maintained by Robert Mauler, who was clearly not able to understand the Audit Commission's own belated legal briefing pointing out that it was nonsense.
Indeed, one reason that the AC went to the trouble of getting the data matching powers put into law was precisely because so many people objected to the uses it was making of the full electoral register, which could lawfully include disregarded adults and also adults whose main residence was not at the discounted address.
When persuading Parliament to give it these powers the Commission persistently and falsely told elected legislators that it used data matching to identify inconsistencies, to the point where Barbara Follett, when Minister, falsely believed that 'by definition' all NFI data matching (barring errors in the data) identified error and maladministration. It is precisely because of the nonsense repeatedly published and spread by the NFI and its regional advisors that so many people came to believe that some people are receiving a 25% discount on the assumption that they literally live alone with no disregarded housemates and that if there is another resident this provides evidence on a case by case basis of fraud (usually alleged falsely to be in the form of an ongoing but legally non existent 'claim').
Subsequently, the NFI began to argue - in effect - that the sort of data mining which Parliament had been so keen to prevent, and which the statutory code of data matching practice was supposed to ensure was the only use by the NFI of personal data was legitimised by the point in the law which said that data matching could be used to assist in the prevention and detection of fraud. So long, the NFI began to argue as the exercise as a whole succeeded in finding some frauds, it did not matter whether or not the computer programmes were designed to identify actual inconsistencies.
I note that the NFI specifically wants additional data mining powers as it mentions fraud risks explicitly. This is the bit that should not be added willy nilly, as being suspected of fraud and investigated for fraud on a 'risk' or statistical basis rather than because there is evidence that you have done something wrong is a horrible experience which far too many people already experience.
The NFI's partners include too many IT experts and people from the murky world of data mining, many of whom have their own financial and profit agendas and limited concern for the privacy of individuals, natural justice or democracy, as evidenced by their continuing publication of misinformation regarding council tax discounts and their relationship to the full electoral register.
They are not an objective, or even, as ample evidence shows, a competent body to comment, not even on matters of local governance and taxation.