Andy Sawford seems to be a nice chap but he is naive.
http://www.publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm201314/cmpublic/localaudit/131119/am/131119s01.htm
In the debate on the Local Audit Bill, he says that he is putting forward amendments which the Audit Commission wants. These are amendments which even the government has rejected. I suppose that for a politician taking a position suggested by an Audit Commission looks like a safe bet. The problem is that the Audit Commission is a strategic and political organisation with an agenda that goes far beyond mere audit functions. It is of course, also a business, which has 'commercial' interests in getting the powers to require councils to buy its products. Not many businesses have such instant access to public funds. One has to look for the sub text.
One cannot of course assume that word for word Mr Sawford is merely parroting Audit Commission briefings or policies but it is depressing to see how his words show lack of understanding of how the NFI actually works.
the Audit Commission has a wide range of powers, some of which it has used to good effect; its appointed power to ensure that bodies subject to data matching follow up on data-matching exercises could be lost
The Audit Commission has no powers at all to make councils 'follow up' matches which are risk-based or which indicate no fraud, error or maladministration. There is nothing to follow up. Moreover, some councils have pointed out that the costs of following up on hit lists with high false positive rates outweighs the income. Indeed, at one point the Commission stated that councils had a 'moral duty' to investigate anybody it decided might not be entitled to a council tax discount. Really? Maybe they have a 'moral duty' not to pester, intimidate and misinform taxpayers in line with the 'good practice' guidelines produced by the Audit Commission.
Mr Sawford may not be aware that on the CT discount 'high risk' matches the Audit Commission has stated a view that a council has a 'moral duty' to investigate people it thinks 'might not' be entitled to their discount, even though there is no evidence of fraud, error or maladministration. This is political, not purely financial. Do politicians never learn that they are not the only ones scoring political points?
Game set and match to the Audit Commission.
One can only hope that Mr Sawford gets subjected to a fraud investigation on such a basis, and that all his future potential employers and bankers are told that he was found to be a fraud risk. Because this is how, quite blithely, he is encouraging the NFI to behave. And of course they won't have bothered to say this in their briefings. Indeed, their local representatives are blithely making false allegations about people all over the country and putting these on line.
When Mr Sawford says that there will be no power to ensure that councils follow up on matches and that such powers currently exist, he is talking through his hat, and basing his arguments on false beliefs, which are positively and actively encouraged by the Audit Commission, about how the whole thing works.
What does the Minister say
Discussion on the arrangements for the governance of the national fraud initiative will continue with representation from interested parties.
These won't include any of the hundreds of thousands of innocent people who have been subjected to unlawful 'investigations' by councils following the false legal guidance put out by Experian and since then other bodies. But it will include the credit reference agencies which make money out of the whole thing!
You have to fall about laughing when Mr Sawford goes on to mention maladministration and auditor powers to deal with this. The Audit Commission actively encourages maladministration as Mr Brandon Lewis's own comments have made clear. It is the tail which wags the dog. The chances of it accepting publicly its own massive and long-standing administrative errors are null. When told by its own legal department that something could more accurately reflect the law and is less than ideal, it in effect ignores it and carries on telling the same old lies about people as it did before, with the effect that credulous people relying on its advice then go on to administer people's financial affairs in ways which flout the law. Heads of Revenue Services stating that the council tax regulations are 'wrong' are merely stating explicitly the way things have been working since Experian and the other data merchants got the Audit Commission on in its Act. The NFI cannot put its own house in order and the government intends to let these people loose on even more data.
THe Government says that discussions on the governance of the NFI are underway. My view is that if the NFI gets its way there won't be any governance of it. It will produce a code giving it free rein to use data mining to finger people as fraud investigation targets on an evidence-free basis. The abortive investigations and false positives will continue. It may even continue to modify its own code while not even bothering to give the Minister a copy of the amendment to lay before Parliament. Would or would not this amount to a deception of Parliament? I think it would.
The rejection of this amendment is a good sign, as otherwise the NFI could broaden the data it gets its hands on and also pretend even more appallingly than ever that fraud suspects are not fraud suspects.
A small ray of hope, perhaps.