Winner of the Fighting Fraud Locally 2012 Award

Background
In the past, Stoke had done press releases and leaflet drops encouraging people to report benefit fraud but wanted to take this to the ‘next level’ to develop and implement a ‘council-wide’, high publicity anti-fraud campaign. The idea being to increase public and staff awareness of the various types of fraud and encourage them to make referrals of potentially fraudulent activity to the Corporate Fraud Team for investigation.

Financial results

• £1.1 million benefit fraud overpayments
• 64 properties recovered
• 4 blue badges returned
• £6,028 fraudulent Council Tax discounts (22 cases)
• Total amount of identified fraud = £1.5 million.Civica solution

Our 'Spot the Cheater' campaign was intended to be different from anything that had gone before. Traditionally, we investigated mainly benefit fraud and we wanted this campaign to go beyond this, to show the public that there were other types of fraud that needed to be dealt with. The next step forward was to bring all our investigations under one corporate investigation management solution. Civica’s Corporate Fraud Solution will enable us to do this."
Paul Bicknell, Corporate Fraud Manager, Stoke-on-Trent City Council

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