Audit Office report identifies more than £4m fraud and error in public payments

More than £4 million worth of actual and potential fraud and error in public payments has been identified following a data-matching exercise in Northern Ireland, an Audit Office report has revealed.

The sum included a significant rise in erroneous pension payments, according to the report by Northern Ireland’s Comptroller and Auditor General Kieran Donnelly on the work of the National Fraud Initiative (NFI).

The NFI is a computer-based data-matching exercise that runs every two years.

Public bodies including government departments, agencies, non-departmental public bodies, councils and health sector bodies participate, with their data sets matched to help identify potentially fraudulent and erroneous transactions.

For the reporting period April 2020 to March 2022, almost £272,000 of fraud and error was detected and recovered.

A further estimated £4.2 million of potential future fraudulent or erroneous payments was prevented.

The report said the majority of outcomes related to pensions, including 78 cases where a pension continued to be paid after the death of the pensioner.

The report gave examples of two separate cases in which pensioners died in June 2019 but the pension-paying authority only became aware of the deaths through the NFI data matches in February 2021.

In the first case, overpayment of pension amounted to £8,805. Recovery of £5,786 was made in April 2021 via the widower’s pension arrears and a lump sum. The balance was being paid back on a monthly basis.

In the second case, the overpayment of pension amounted to £7,677. The pension-paying authority was pursuing recovery of the funds through contact with the deceased’s personal representatives and a family member. But to date the full amount remained outstanding.

The report noted that while it was possible that the Covid-19 pandemic had been a factor in the increased number of pension cases, this could not be confirmed.

The report also provided an example of an instance when a health trust did not notify the Finance Department that a care home resident had died in July 2020 and it continued to pay for their care until receipt of the NFI data match in early 2021.

The overpayment to the care home amounted to almost £21,000. It had been recovered in full and the trust had confirmed there was no fraudulent activity.

There were significantly reduced outcomes in relation to rates evasion, with £58,000 recovered or prevented in this reporting period compared with £936,000 in 2018 to 2020.

Mr Donnelly’s report said that as a result of the significant pressures stemming from the pandemic, the amount of time devoted by rates staff to NFI investigations had been curtailed.

The exercise also identified £40,000 in duplicate payments recovered from suppliers.

Mr Donnelly said: “While it is impossible to eradicate fraud entirely, all public bodies in Northern Ireland have a duty to help minimise its impact and to maximise the proper use of funding for public services.

“To date, NFI exercises have recovered or protected over £44 million of public money here.

“I would call on organisations across the public sector here to strongly consider participating in future data-matching exercises, so that we can continue to deliver these positive outcomes for citizens.”