Recommendation 16

The Department informed us that it has taken steps to mitigate the impact of these easements. It said it believes the key thing is to have a real-time data feed that enables it to check that the mitigations it has put in place are being effective. It provided an example of it closely monitoring the referrals that its staff make to its centralised Enhanced Checking Service.33 This is a new function, comprising 600 trained fraud investigators, to whom benefit processing staff can refer any suspicious cases for further investigation and additional verification.34 The Department told us that the portion of claims being referred to Enhanced Checking Service “peaked at one level at about 13%, but it has since fallen back to about 3% on average.” The Department explained that it also gets real time information to monitor the fraud and error impact of control easements from “predictive analytics”.35