National Fraud Initiative: HMRC and local authority counter fraud 2023
This memorandum of understanding for HMRC and local authority counter fraud business as usual was agreed and put in place in 2023.
Documents
Details
This agreement is published as part of the Code of Practice for public authorities disclosing information under Chapters 1, 3 and 4 (Public Service Delivery, Debt and Fraud) of Part 5 of the Digital Economy Act 2017.
The National Fraud Initiative (NFI) is the Cabinet Office’s UK-wide data matching exercise. It is exploring the potential value and effectiveness of using HMRC data to better identify and prevent fraud. Records containing personal data will be matched against HMRC records and additional HMRC information will be appended and fed back to the NFI who will release them to NFI participants for them to review and investigate, as applicable, in order to prevent and detect fraud. The pilot will then be evaluated as to how it may improve the NFI national exercise in prevention and detection of fraud.
The intended benefits are:
- to provide additional intelligence on data matches already generated and released by NFI for participant organisations to consider and investigate where appropriate
- to allow the NFI to update its fraud risk scoring of the released matches
- to assist with the reduction of potential false positive data match disclosure within the existing NFI data matching
- to allow additional counter fraud data matches to be generated from just the additional HMRC results