Issue - meetings

Housing Benefit Grant Claim

Meeting: 13/01/2020 - Audit, Governance and Standards Committee (Item 72)

72 Housing Benefit Grant Claim pdf icon PDF 59 KB

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Minutes:

The Business Support Manager presented the report on the outcome of the Housing Benefit Grant Claim audit undertaken by Grant Thornton to certify the Housing Benefit Subsidy Claim for 2018-19.

 

The Housing Benefits team carried out over 56,000 assessments covering over £45.5m.  Four errors were found in initial testing, which resulted in a further 200 cases being tested.  In carrying out the audit the auditors found a 99.91% accuracy rate, with errors causing a net effect of no overall change to the value to the Council.

 

In response to the auditor’s findings the Housing Benefits team were undertaking a review of all the errors identified and reviewing all similar cases for the 2019/20 grant claim.

 

In response to questions it was noted that although the report set out 4 errors found in 40 Housing Benefit claims this was not a 10% error rate but much lower as there were many interactions on each case. The majority of errors were figures being transposed.  The Committee requested that a note clarifying the error rate calculation be included in future reports.

 

RESOLVED: That

 

1.  The findings of the Housing Benefit Grant Claim Audit undertaken by Grant Thornton be noted; and

 

2.  The action plan proposed by the Revenues and Benefits Shared Service to address errors identified through the audit process be noted.