In plain English: every two years the government's National Fraud Initiative cross-checks councils' records and hands each council a list of suspicious "matches" — possible fraudulent discounts, pensions paid to the dead, duplicate payments. This number counts how many of those cases the council has finished dealing with, whatever the verdict. It matters as a measure of follow-through: flags that are never closed are fraud warnings left unread. The status lives in a secure government system and is not published per council, so it must be requested from the audit body.
| name | nfi_matches_closed |
|---|---|
| dataset | 08-national-fraud-initiative |
| kind | prospective |
| type | numeric (count) |
| unit | matches per biennial exercise |
| grain | council, per biennial NFI exercise |
| role | input / effort measure |
| source | not published centrally — route (b) PSFA/audit-body request for closed-status counts from the NFI web application; occasionally in committee papers |
| period | biennial exercises |
| missingness | expected high — same secure-application limitation as nfi_matches_investigated |
| score_note | Near-duplicate of matches_investigated with an even fuzzier closed-status meaning. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The number of a council's matches given a closed status per exercise — the numerator of the investigation rate (closed / total). It would show how much of the released match workload the council actually disposed of. The NFI publishes no per-council figures; a closed match may mean investigated-and-resolved or written off without real scrutiny, so it is an imperfect effort measure.