Liberata’s Fraud Prevention and Resolution Team has been working in partnership with the London Borough of Southwark for over ten years. We have a responsibility to prevent and detect housing and council tax benefit fraud, in order to protect public funds.
Within the last four years, the Benefit Investigation Team has enabled Southwark to achieve a rating of ‘excellent’. An inspection was carried out by the government’s Audit Commission, which recognised the team’s achievements, saying: ‘Fraud arrangements are good and form a key part of the necessary arrangements to protect public funds. The number of sanctions and prosecutions secured being good compared to other London Boroughs, with the number of prosecutions being the highest of any London Borough in 2007/08.’
We provide:
- A comprehensive and externally validated procedure manual
- A team of investigation officers with extensive experience of complex and serious fraud cases
- Investigation support officers (trained in all aspects of NFI administration work)
- Fully trained financial investigators enabling the council to recoup the ‘proceeds of criminal activity’
- An internal transcription service
- A range of established joint working arrangements
We are now seeking to further enhance the service we provide by working in partnership with a leading solutions provider. Through this partnership, we can offer clients the opportunity to participate in ground-breaking intelligence gathering, to inform fraud investigations and risk management. Current users of this solution include critical, high security services within central government, and a range of commercial clients from utilities through to global insurance agencies.
This will increase our scope for valuable intelligence being available to assist with serious and complex investigations. These information links go far wider and deeper than those of organisations such as Experian, and being HMRC compliant means it is fully endorsed by central government. We intend to approach some of our existing clients to be involved in the pilot for this opportunity.
Key benefits clients would experience from this include:
- Targeting high risk claims for review
- Reduce benefit overpayments
- Reduce claim processing times
- Greater efficiencies through better intelligence led investigations
- Tracing of debtors (all services)
- Serious and complex fraud detection
This will directly enable councils to offer housing places to deserving citizens, therefore reducing the waiting list.