In plain English: every two years the government's National Fraud Initiative cross-checks councils' records and flags suspicious payments — pensions still paid to the dead, fraudulent discounts, duplicate invoices. This number counts how many of those flags a council actually opened and looked into. It matters because the cross-check only catches fraud if someone follows up: a council can receive thousands of warnings and investigate almost none. This status data sits in a secure government system and no per-council figures are published, so it rarely reaches the public.
| name | nfi_matches_investigated |
|---|---|
| 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 NFI web-application match statuses is the reliable path; some councils' committee papers also report it |
| period | biennial exercises |
| missingness | expected high — status data lives in the secure NFI web application and rarely reaches the public |
| score_note | Key effort denominator locked inside the secure NFI application. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The number of a council's matches that were actually worked on (given an investigation status) in an exercise. It would measure investigative effort — crucial because NFI investigation is discretionary and risk-based, so raw outcomes conflate fraud levels with effort. Not centrally published anywhere; obtainable only via bespoke request, and status recording discipline varies between councils.