In an astonishingly inaccurate Audit Commission Guide document published on the web site of CIPFA (another organisation with a long history of publishing false information about both council tax discounts and the full electoral register) Robert Hammond states that councils can elect to submit council tax data and electoral register data every year
'to detect council tax discount fraud'.
CIPFA appears to have an active policy of misrepresenting taxation discount law. It has actively misled government agencies about this, even though one of its senior officials knows that what it has published about the law is wrong. He said that behaving like this was 'good governance'. I think there may be a problem in that some accountants know nothing about public law, and it doesn't occur to them that councils must obey the law and have a duty not to misrepresent the law.
Is Mr Hammond a liar, or merely negligent and mistaken producing this utterly misleading presentation? If the Audit Commission were a person, one would have no doubt at all in concluding that s/he is a liar, for no honest person could possibly make so many inaccurate, prejudicial and self-contradictory allegations about their fellow taxpayers, misleading ministers, delegates and the general public while being paid for this out of the 'public purse' which they are supposedly trying to protect. This is not a valid use of public money.
Can councils do as Mr Hammond says?
No they cannot. One reason that it is unlawful to use the electoral register to decide where the sole or main residence of a person is. The NFI (which as we know contradicts itself, with this being just another example) denies that people on its council tax hit lists are even suspected of fraud. It denies ever having thought that one could tell via the electoral register whether there was entitlement to a 25% discount. It tells the Government that all its communications make it clear that the CT - ER output does not indicate failure to provide information required by law, lack of entitlement or even maladministration by the local council. Clearly what it tells the government isn't true (but we knew that anyway). This output provides no evidence of fraud at all, and especially not of dishonest intention on anybody's part. As the NFI knows very well the overwhelming majority of investigations are utterly abortive in terms of finding fraud or error.
And once again this misinformation appears on the web site of CIPFA, a body which gives an increasingly poor impression of itself with every piece of legally false information on this topic it produces.
Public accountants should have a sufficient grasp of public law to avoid publishing statements by public bodies which flout their duties to provide reliable information and their promises to publish more 'comprehensive' guidance on the output from this data analytics exercise in future.
The comparison between the council tax data sets and the full electoral register provides no evidence of fraud whatsoever. I say this with reference to the definition of that crime as laid down in law.
As a public employee (albeit via the Audit Commission) Mr Hammond has a duty to provide reliable information. The councils and others to whom he addresses this abysmal PR presentation have a duty to abide by the regulations governing local government finance.
So much for the promises of the NFI to publish 'more comprehensive' accounts of the output of this exercise. So much also for the assurances given by the NFI to Bob Neill and Brandon Lewis that all their communications about this output make it clear that it does not show lack of entitlement, failure to declare changes required by law or even any maladministration. Clearly these assurances were unreliable. And I should be surprised because .... ?
I do not know whether Robert Hammond has more qualifications for his job than other Roberts employed by the Audit Commission to issue false statements in public, but whatever his qualifications, council tax and electoral law and the requirements of public law as these affect public bodies like his own Commission would appear not to be among them.
Mr Hammond is an NFI 'coordinator'. His job is to advise participants. One would be well advised not to pay any attention to his advice if all of it is of this appalling quality.