Sheer cheek of the Audit Commission

You will now find the following astonishing piece on the web site of the Audit Commission:

Please note the following:

• The Commission has made a very minor amendment to one sentence of the full text as it is produced on the Fair processing notice – Full text web page but not as it appears in the Code. The amendment is to the second paragraph and is shown below in tracked changes.

“Where a match is found it may indicates that there is an inconsistency that requires further investigation.”
This amendment was made to more fully align the full text with the relevant text in the Code, which states at paragraph 2.2.2. that “where a match is found, it indicates that there may be an inconsistency that requires further investigation”.

The full facts of the matter are that this change happened because the Independent Complaints reviewer, when dealing with a complaint that it was perfectly legal to be in receipt of a 'single person discount' when more than one adult was legally entitled to vote at an address, concluded, incorrectly in my view, that the Code was ambiguous between asserting that a match indicated that there was an inconsistency and that a match may indicate that there is an inconsistency.  In deciding that the Code was 'ambiguous' she ignored the fact that the Code states that the aim of matching is to identify inconsistencies, and the fact that the arguments for such processing by national audit bodies and auditors were precisely that it was a cheap way of identifying discrepancies which provided reasonable grounds to suspect fraud.

The response of the Commission at that time was a) to modify its FPN and b) to ask participants to alter theirs, thereby avoiding the significant problems caused by the fact that from the outset it had asserted falsely that certain people could be certified by local councils as receiving or claiming a 'single person'  discount on the basis that they lived alone, excluding cases where the discount was being applied on the basis that there was more than one sole or main resident but all except one fell to be disregarded. 

The change was not made to bring the FPN 'into line' with the relevant text in the code, as the relevant text is the code as a whole and not this one section.  As usual we get a biased and misleading account of history from the Audit Commission. 

It is arrogance of the highest sort to make this sort of change, which affects the whole basis of the code fundamentally, without alerting or asking the permission of Parliament, without, apparently consulting counsel or any unbiased expert, or the Information Commissioner, while claiming that it is a 'minor' change.  The definition of data matching as matching to identify actual inconsistencies was so firmly fixed in the minds of those involved that Barbara Follet, when Minister, wrote that 'by definition' all NFI data matching indicated discrepancies or inconsistencies.  She cannot be blamed for this: it is what the NFI always said and what Parliament was told.

Single Person Discount Review

You may receive a 'review letter' from your council saying something like the following:  'Our records show that you are receiving a discount as you live alone.  We are required to verify whether you are still entitled to this discount'.  

The councils records cannot properly show that a situation which cannot arise in law applies to your finances.  You are, or should be, receiving a discount of the appropriate amount on the assumption that the same rate will apply on every day of the coming year.  If there is more than one entitled voter resident or if another person uses your address as a 'care of' address, this is in itself perfectly legal and does not constitute an irregularity. What would constitute an irregularity would be if there were two of you living there as your main home, and neither of you were disregarded.  In which case you would owe the council more tax as the discount would not apply. But the odds are overwhelming that a person in receipt of one of these investigation letters is not guilty of any wrong-doing. 

Beware of promising to inform the council if anybody moves in to your property. You have no such duty in law, but at least one council deliberately misleads people as to their obligations in this respect and several falsely state that not doing this means the council can penalise you.  There are even council web pages which state that it is an offence and that you can be 'fined'.

Your council ought not to be providing you with false or misleading information, and such letters are valid grounds for complaints on the grounds of maladministration.  

You might also ask your MP to write to Brandon Lewis asking him why he is providing incorrect information on official notepaper in this way,  especially given the messages put out by his predecessor Bob Neill.  

A good, if incomplete, research review of council tax discount law, dated early 2009 may be obtained from the Audit Commission and is also available on the Internet.

NB  Dishonestly making false or misleading statements to obtain a financial gain can amount to fraud and should in all circumstances be avoided!