Issue - meetings

This report details the work undertaken by the in-house resources in the Audit and Risk team and communicates a final update on completion of the work plan for 2022/23.

Ms Vanessa Bateman, Deputy Head of Audit and Risk Management, introduced the report.

The meeting heard that:

·      In relation to tenancy fraud, the teams involved were legal and tenancy management officers. Referrals could be received from anywhere, but they were mostly received from tenancy management officers. There was a case management system and it was imbedded. Prosecutions may take time – up to a few years. An analysis could be done for this in future reports.  

·      Fraud relating to blue badges was a new area of work. There have been a lot of investments in blue badges and Technology in relation to the area of blue badges. It was important to focus on deterrents and this came with sanctions and prosecutions. There had been an employee related case in relation to blue badges and this case was prosecuted.

·      An income-flow would be generated from the work.

·      It was ideal that this income was streamed into Parking and Fraud teams as the teams were small. 

·      A significant amount of time had been spent in the year to get officers to follow through on actions, although chasing actions from a practical perspective was not particularly taxing.

·      The case management system allowed the cases to be monitored and accessed easily.  Legal and the Housing Management Tenancy teams have their own systems. There was good working relationship between the three teams.

·      The no recourse to public funds team performed a lot of checks and balances. The Audit and Risk team would usually get complex cases perhaps where financial fingerprints needed to be established. 

·      Temporary Accommodation was one area where savings could be made. It was clear that there was a lack of preventative checks in the housing system. More data intelligence needed to be used to be able to foresee issues.  However, improvements in systems were always being sought.

·      Audit and Risk tended to understand risk, quantify and identify it and collate the work to help everybody else involved to understand the issue before the relevant management was approached.

The Chair felt it would be useful to have an update on Temporary Accommodation. It would also be useful to highlight areas of greatest risks to the Council via regular reporting.

RESOLVED:

To note the activities of the team during quarter four of 2022/23