This organisation needs to be shot (joke!!)
Their report is hugely amusing.
It refers to various Audit Commission activities and data mining uncritically, and one may suspect that the people actually believe that the AC spreads knowledge about 'good practice'. This is questionable. Given that councils actively refuse to apply council tax regulations on the basis that the Audit Commission won't let them, somebody is having the wool pulled over their eyes.
I think they ought to call for an investigation of 'corruption' within the Audit Commission. Why for example, are Audit Commission staff apparently ignoring the legal briefing prepared some years ago spelling out the facts of council tax discount law? Whether this results from fraud or error or has another explanation, it is difficult to say. But it is an apparent inconsistency requiring investigation!
3. Understanding and awareness of fraud and corruptionThe Audit Commission previously collected and published data, allowing it to trace patterns and trends in corruption and fraud. If the Commission is abolished, it will be difficult to know whether councils are detecting more or less corruption and fraud, or engaging in better or weaker monitoring and prevention activities.Recommendation: Notwithstanding the localism agenda, it is critical that some element of central oversight is restored. At a minimum, this should involve data collection and consistent standards.
At a select committee discussion on contracting out and the problems of monitoring contracts, this organisation was present. All the time I felt the irony that firms like Capita. Experian and so on are taking money for carrying out council duties arising under Regulation 14 of the Council Tax Administration and Enforcement Regulations and doing this in flagrant breach of the regulations themselves. They misrepresent Regulation 14 as a duty to check a 'claim' which has no legal existence against credit reference agency information. They claim to be 'checking your validity to claim' a single person discount which nobody can in law be receiving, selecting households for this purpose where the code 'single' represents facts stated or thought to be correct on a certain day in the past, and not the basis on which the person is claiming or receiving their bill. Time after time, the relative cheapness of this procedure is cited, as opposed to the old way of sending out canvass forms before the start of each tax year. This is supposed to be 'joined up' government, data sharing, transformational and so on. What it is is in fact corrupt, incompetent and improper.
Moreover, the Audit Commission, whose contribution to probity was much lauded by this same firm, has been at the forefront of this, guided by four London Boroughs which got it wrong. Subsequently, the Audit Commission Legal Department sent to the NFI a legal briefing pointing out the basic flaw in the logic, but that report has most certainly not been acted upon, and promises issued about providing better information about this data mining activity have been honoured only in the breach.
Sorry Transparency International, your intentions might be good, but the problem I have located goes to the bodies managing the audit: the Audit Commission itself. Proudly independent, and highly political and strategic, and staffed by persons who get things wrong so often that it is frightening, this unaccountable body has got away with far too much, and is now actively seeking to ensure that some of the worst of its mistakes live on after it.
