Recommendation 22

Legislation also requires that data collected as part of the National Fraud Initiative, enabled by the Local Audit and Accountability Act, can only be retained for the two years – the duration of each biennial exercise. The PSFA told us that this data would be useful to inform counter-fraud work if it was retained for longer. This is common practice in other industries where they use historical data on fraud to identify trends and train models to understand what to look for. We note that it is common practice elsewhere for records to be retained for longer. For instance, HMRC requires companies to retain records for six years.60 56 C&AG’s Report, para 2.25 57 HC Committee of Public Accounts, DWP Customer Service and Accounts 2023–24, Sixth report of session 2024–25, HC 354, 31 January 2025, para 7 58 Q 92 59 Q 92 60 Qq 92 and 96 17