Recommendation 24

There are specific risk areas such as capital, living together, self-reported and self- employed earnings where the Department admits it is harder to tackle fraud and error, in part due to the lack of access it has to timely, accurate data.46 In 2019–20, measured capital fraud and error rose by £380 million (73%) to £910 million across all measured benefits; the largest increase in value for any individual risk type.47 The Department told us that it is “looking very carefully, particularly with colleagues in other parts of Government”, to see what data it can use to get better access to capital information.48 Although there are data sets available, there are time lag issues with these data sets. The Department also informed us that it has performed some initial work on tackling capital risk using data from banks which it says gave “really good results”.49