Fraud Teams saved £900,000 for council in last year

Powys County Council’s audit committee received assurances that tackling fraud is taken seriously by staff at their meeting on Thursday, December 10.

Phil Pugh of the Welsh Audit Office gave the councillors a presentation on a report by Auditor General for Wales, Adrian Crompton, called ‘Raising Our Game’ Tackling Fraud in Wales.”

Mr Pugh told councillors that WAO research estimated that government organisations could lose between 0.5 and five per-cent of their expenditure to fraud.

This is worth from £100 million to £1 billion a year and if applied to Powys could be mean a loss of anywhere from £2.1 million to £21.5 million

Mr Pugh added that there had been scepticism of the levels of fraud in some quarters.

He said that this means lack of investment in counter fraud arrangements, and that investigation is given a low priority.

During disasters, fraudsters would also try and take advantage of the funding being used to deal with the situation.

Mr Pugh said: “Fraudsters appear at the very instant an opportunity presents itself, while we had the recent flooding incidents earlier this year, scammers were trying to gain any benefit they could.

“In the current covid times there have been more attempts at fraud through cybercrime, fraudulent grant or support applications.”

He stressed that one of the recommendations of the report is that local authority audit committee “must become fully engaged with counter-fraud, providing demonstrable support and direction, monitoring and holding officials to account”.

Committee chairman Councillor John Morris said: “This is something that we as an audit committee need assurance on that we are addressing fraud in a proactive way.”

Head of finance Jane Thomas explained that due to the ongoing pandemic, the fraud team had been involved in the roll-out of business grants during the autumn, and a report specific to Powys’s work on its anti-fraud work had been delayed.

She hoped, pandemic allowing, that a report could be available soon.

Powys Income and Awards team employs two officers with counter fraud accreditation and two former police officers with investigative skills.

The team is run by David Morris, the council’s senior manager for income and awards.

Mr Morris said: “We’ve been quite good in anti-fraud work, an example from last year is we found £300,000 worth of fraud and error from over-payments by the council in 2019/20 – that’s what’s recoverable.

“We’ve also found income savings of around £600,000.

“The team are very proactive and they use data intelligence to identifying fraud and error across the council.”

Councillor Morris said he hoped to receive the Powys specific report at the next Audit Committee meeting in February.