Another Day, Another Report on Housing Benefit Incompetence

Next week's Audit Committee meeting will have another opportunity to enjoy what is becoming a regular ritual; the presentation of yet another report detailing what a bunch of fuck-ups the housing benefits service is. I say fuck-ups but there is the hint of something more sinister going on, more on that in a bit.

This latest installment consists of NCC's Internal Audit services latest report on the housing benefits service which it seems they now do annually. I wrote about the 2009 edition before. The 2010 version was prepared in February of this year but we only get to see it if it's one of the sample of Internal Audit reports that are put before the Audit Committee. As such it was done at the same time as the report from the Audit Commission that tore HB a new one and resulted in the possibility of them having to pay a £2m subsidy overclaim back to central government. As far as I know that's still under dispute.

So what did this latest report say? Well they picked up on the total lack of quality control that the Audit Commission was so scathing about. This included a lack of checks on claims processed by external firm Mouchel which is just asking for trouble. As a reminder, Mouchel got over £266k of our money in 2008/9 for who knows how much worth of benefit claims processed. I'd want to keep a close eye on that myself.

A very interesting piece of detail concerns the reporting of different types of overpayments. Essentially, it seems that if errors in benefit assessments caused by the council itself (as opposed to claimants) are below a certain level (approx £616k) NCC still gets full subsidy on it. If it's between a certain range (£616k - £693k) only 40% of subsidy is paid and above that latter figure they get none. In other words there's a pretty strong incentive to keep council caused errors down, which makes sense.

Other types of error are treated differently (see para 400 onwards), for example, error caused by claimants always attracts a 40% subsidy. Errors which are the fault of the DWP or HMRC are fully reimbursed.

Now, this wasn't mentioned in the Audit Commission report but it seems that NCC is prone to incorrect classification of overpayments, occurring in 25% of a sample checked by Internal Audit. From the report -

"For 2008-9 we claimed £0.5m LA Error but would receive no subsidy if the figure exceeded £0.7m...

...Failure to follow proper procedures results in incorrect subsidy classification – we understand that, despite training, experienced staff continue to shortcut such a procedure. Our testing of 20 overpayments showed 25% where failure to follow procedure led to overpayment classification errors. Overpayment classification has not been checked since Jun 08."

It's not explicitly stated but by reading between the lines you get the feeling that the results of incorrect classification only go one way i.e. to reduce local authority error and retaining the subsidy. This would not be inconsistent with the Audit Commission's conclusion that a major overpayment of subsidy had occurred.

And the slightly tart statement about 'experienced staff' who 'despite training' tend to 'shortcut' the classification procedures. Which results in lower rates of overpayments caused by local authority error. And more subsidy...

Hmmm. Like I said, it's not explicitly stated.

Anyway, as I've said before, Internal Audit would have to march on the Audit Committee wearing rainbow striped lederhosen carrying a 30ft banner saying 'Housing Benefits Staff Are Wrongly Classifying Overpayments So We Get More Subsidy' before it would even raise an eyebrow. I predict a total lack of concern along with a side order of vague promises including 'action plans*' and 'targeted training' etc next Friday.

*If you ever have the misfortune to work at NCC you will soon notice that they love 'action plans'. Generally speaking, in NCC's usage of the phrase it means close to the exact opposite of what it says resulting in very little action and the absence of anything resembling a plan. At NCC, 'action plans' and 'reports' have become the end in itself, instead of the means to an end.

Housing Benefits Still Shit

Things aren't going so well for Lisa Black. Not only did she make a complete twat of herself at my employment tribunal last year she is also failing to lead the Housing Benefits service out of its inability to get its sums right.

Last February I wrote about how NCC had the worst accuracy scores for Housing Benefits processing in the whole of the East Midlands.

That concerned figures for 2007. Now the Audit Commission has stated that things are getting worse, saying in a progress report to the Council's Audit Committee -

"We found a higher number of errors in the processing of individual claims than in
previous years, although the overall effect on the amount of subsidy due to the Council
was small. We will be discussing with officers why the number of errors in our samples
has increased."

The thing is, NCC's internal audit service reported on Housing Benefits' chronic inaccuracy record to the Audit Committee last February, as I wrote about here.

And yet the Audit Committee seems to have been satisfied with a glib assurance that -

"...quality control errors in individual benefit claims’ processing, highlighted during the audit, were being addressed through joint working between officers and the Audit Commission..."

Surely somebody high up should be taking responsibility for this?

Nottingham City Council Internal Audit; Please Do Try and Keep Up

A little while ago I wrote about how NCC's Housing Benefits managers manipulated the assessment by the Benefits Fraud Inspectorate to give a somewhat optimistic impression of how good their service was. Well, belatedly, NCC's internal audit seems to have picked up on some of this.

An internal audit report which was considered by the Audit committee recently made the following comments;

"Quality performance and management is neither stringent nor robust and processing accuracy cannot be considered adequate. " 

"The outcomes of the post payment check should be of great concern to the service management. DWP performance standard at level 1 (the worst) for the percentage of cases for which the calculation of the amount of benefit due is correct is less than 96%. As at 31st January 2008, the City’s performance was only 93.1% overall and as low as 90.4% in quarter 2." 

"...they were all basic errors which should be easily avoided by well trained and motivated staff." 

"Quality assessments prepared by the quality team which were available to us by 31st January 2008 suggest that serious problems exist with the accuracy of new claims processing by in house staff. The quality team found that financial errors in new claims are running above 25%..."
 
Hmmm, I think I said all that. Essentially NCC have dumped quality in favour of speed because its worth a higher weighting in external assessments.

Then there's this little gem which surprised me;

"During the year, processing of new claims was progressively taken back in house. City Audit Services has, in previous years, been critical of external contractor performance. "
 
Hello? Did anybody else know that Housing Benefits were using external processing for claims? They certainly kept that one quiet. I can feel another Freedom of Information Act request coming on...

Then there's this;

"The City has a policy to encourage the legitimate take-up of benefit...it is not clear when, where and to whom the policy and strategy has been communicated."

The phrase 'it is not clear when..' is usually in my experience polite codespeak for 'it hasn't...' and I know I was never told about it when I worked there and I reckon I would have been within the target audience.

Unfortunately, it goes off the boil a bit here;

"Our testing indicates that decision notices contain a standard paragraph drawing the claimant’s attention to the right to request a revision/review or appeal..."
 
Not true I'm afraid although it depends what you're talking about. As I've written, the standard notification template did not include this info at least not between March and December last year. However, if you get a bespoke letter then it does include it. However, this isa very small minority of cases. It looks like Housing Benefit management misled their own auditors by providing copies of the bespoke letter template instead of the standard notification template.

A quick look at the minutes of the actual meeting will obviously reveal a forensic and robust examination of these problems. Oh, not really...;

"(i) under ‘post payment checks’, Internal Audit had determined that the reasons for basic errors should be investigated and urgently fed back into targeted training to improve accuracy levels;
 
(ii) under ‘processing of new claims’, Internal Audit had determined that the reasons for poor performance should be investigated and urgently fed back into targeted training to improve accuracy levels;
 
In response to (i) and (ii) above, it was reported that both actions had been completed and all staff were now fully trained"
 
I bet they even said 'Lets move on...' Dumb ass mistakes continue to be made in my experience though, when I put my claim for Council Tax Benefit they got completely the wrong start date, the sort of error thats typical of somebody in a bit of a rush...

And there was this;

"...consideration should be given to ways of informing the public of what benefits they were eligible to claim"

Duh, thats a good idea, wonder how long it took for councillors to come up with that one. Will that include Discretionary Housing Payments?

Because again, there was absolutely no mention of these either in the audit report nor in the subsequent discussion. But then Nobody at NCC seems to be aware that they exist so thats par for the course.