In plain English: every two years the government's National Fraud Initiative cross-checks public-sector records against each other — pension rolls against death records, discounts against the electoral roll — and flags every payment that looks suspicious. This number is the national total of those flags per exercise, a gauge of how much potential fraud the cross-check surfaces across the whole system. A match is a lead to investigate, not proven fraud. It is published only as a national figure: no per-council breakdown exists.
| name | nfi_total_matches |
|---|---|
| dataset | 08-national-fraud-initiative |
| kind | extracted |
| type | numeric (count) |
| unit | matches per biennial exercise |
| grain | national, per biennial NFI exercise |
| role | national context / benchmark |
| source | trend table in the NFI biennial reports (data/NFI_report_2022-24.pdf) |
| period | biennial exercises |
| missingness | none at national level; no per-council breakdown exists |
| score_note | National twin of nfi_matches_total; scale context with no efficiency content. |
| peer_group | council class (district / county / unitary / metropolitan / London) — not yet scored on the leaderboard |
The number of data matches generated per NFI exercise nationally (309,593 in 2022–24). It provides scale context only — it cannot say anything about a single council's match volume or fraud exposure. Caveat: match counts reflect data-set participation and matching rules, not fraud levels, and this series is national-only.