In plain English: every two years the government's National Fraud Initiative cross-checks councils' records to flag payments that shouldn't have happened — pensions still paid to the dead, fraudulent discounts, duplicate invoices. Because a council can get thousands of these flags, the system marks the most suspicious ones as "key report" matches: the shortlist investigators are told to look at first. This number counts that priority shortlist for a council, a rough gauge of its most serious fraud exposure. It is not published centrally — only some councils (notably Welsh ones) put it in their audit-committee papers.
| name | nfi_key_report_matches |
|---|---|
| dataset | 08-national-fraud-initiative |
| kind | prospective |
| type | numeric (count) |
| unit | key-report matches per biennial exercise |
| grain | council, per biennial NFI exercise |
| role | input / priority-workload measure |
| source | not published centrally — route (a) council audit-committee papers; present in the Welsh sample papers in data/samples/ |
| period | biennial exercises |
| missingness | expected very high — only some councils (notably Welsh ones in the samples) report this figure |
| score_note | Priority-workload proxy visible only in some (mostly Welsh) committee papers. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The subset of a council's matches flagged as "key reports" — match categories with historically high hit rates that the NFI recommends investigating first. It would proxy the council's high-priority fraud workload better than raw match totals. No central per-council publication exists; availability depends entirely on individual committee papers, and the key-report definition is set by the NFI and can change between exercises.