"Jobcentre Plus has made good progress in a number of
areas about which I have expressed concern in the past; but there
are still problems and the level of error in these payments is
still material. This has led me to qualify my opinion. Jobcentre
Plus should continue work to address my concerns and I will
continue to monitor progress."
Amyas Morse, head of the National Audit Office, 11 July
2011
The Comptroller and Auditor General, Amyas Morse, has qualified
the Social Fund White Paper Account for the eighth consecutive
year. The account has been qualified because of material levels of
error in discretionary awards, which include Budgeting Loans,
Crisis Loans and Community Care Grants, and in Funeral Expense
Payments. He has also qualified his opinion on Cold Weather
Payments, for the first time, because of the level of error found
in these payments.
The C&AG has for the second consecutive year, also limited
the scope of his opinion on the level of debt within the account,
owing to the absence of sufficient appropriate evidence to support
the breakdown of the customer debt balance.
The NAO estimates that the most likely level of error in
discretionary awards, Funeral Expense Payments and Cold Weather
Payments in 2010-11 is £98.3 million, approximately 2.4 per cent of
total payments. The estimated level of error in Cold Weather
Payments during 2010-11 totalled £21.5 million, some 5 per cent of
payments (no error was found in 2009-10). The C&AG has,
however, removed his qualification of Sure Start Maternity Grants,
as the NAO found no errors in 2010-11 payments.
The NAO's work shows that the main causes of 'irregularity' are
Jobcentre Plus's inability to provide the documentation needed to
support cases selected for audit and a failure to comply with
regulations when making awards. Jobcentre Plus believes that the
continued high instance of error is due to the ongoing
reorganisation of its process centre network, and that the
inability to locate all documentation results from the large
amounts of paperwork that have been moved between JCP offices
during the year.
In an attempt to resolve the issues that the C&AG reported
on in 2009-10, Jobcentre Plus set up the Social Fund Task Force.
However, while Jobcentre Plus has made progress in a number of
areas, the sheer number of records and the complexities of the
computer systems involved have meant that work on some areas has
not progressed as quickly as Jobcentre Plus had hoped. The Task
Force's plans provide a solid foundation on which Jobcentre Plus
should build in future to resolve the issues.