In plain English: every two years the government's National Fraud Initiative cross-checks councils' records to flag payments that shouldn't have happened. This variable breaks a council's flagged cases down by the kind of risk — single-person council-tax discounts, blue badges, payroll, supplier payments and so on — showing where its fraud exposure actually sits. That matters because a council drowning in blue-badge flags needs a different response from one with payroll problems. No central publication carries this per council; it only surfaces in some councils' audit-committee papers.
| name | nfi_matches_by_area |
|---|---|
| dataset | 08-national-fraud-initiative |
| kind | prospective |
| type | numeric (count), by category |
| unit | matches per data-match area per biennial exercise |
| grain | council, per data-match area (SPD, creditors, blue badges, payroll, …), per exercise |
| role | input / risk-profile measure |
| source | not published centrally — route (a) council audit-committee papers (the data/samples/ Audit Wales papers show the typical shape) or route (b) PSFA/audit-body request for NFI web-application extracts |
| period | biennial exercises |
| missingness | expected high — depends on each council publishing area-level tables; formats vary widely |
| score_note | Unique risk-profile shape, but formats vary wildly and it says little about efficiency. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
A council's match counts broken down by NFI data-match area, showing where its matching exposure concentrates (single person discount, trade creditors, blue badges, payroll, etc.). It would sketch the council's fraud-risk profile relative to the national Appendix 2 pattern. National publications carry no such per-council breakdown, and committee-paper formats are inconsistent across councils and years.