At Southwark Council’s Audit & Governance meeting last week the officers report on anti fraud activities (page 89) states “4000 Single Persons Discount matches were released in February 2012 and work has commenced on these.”
The match is finding local and central govt data records of 2 or more people living at an address where a single persons council tax discount is claimed.
A few months ago Lambeth claimed they found 15,000 such matches by using a commercial agency checking against bank etc address records. (http://www.southlondonpress.co.uk/news.cfm?id=35616)
So either Southwark is failing big time to find all the potential wrong claims for single persons discount or Lambeth is wasting a lot of residents time fighting to keep single persons discount.
Which do you suspect?
But as each wrong discount will be costing circa £300 on average whether its 4,000 or 15,000 that is an awful lot of money not being collected. This means the correct council tax payers in Southwark are needlessly being asked for £11 to £43 per household per year.
The issue being, of course, that you can have two people living at the same address with only one of them being eligible to pay council tax – students, for example, are exempt from paying council tax but would still show up as a person living at an address.