It has been long suspected by Revenues Officers that a number of the SPD claimants contacted submit incorrect or misleading information to fraudulently maintain their discount, usually with the knowledge that councils don’t have the information or resource to challenge their response. Further, it is a daunting and costly exercise to pass the claimant responses to a fraud investigation team to investigate and verify, meaning the claimant declarations go unchallenged losing the council much needed council tax revenues.
Our SMART Referrals™ addresses this issue.
Originally developed in 2015, SMART Referrals™ is a service unique to Datatank, allowing Council's to go one step further and challenge fraudulent SPD responses and collect additional revenue. We perform a detailed review of all targeted claimants who confirm they are still entitled to the discount, to determine the likelihood they made a false response, this is done using credit bureau data obtained under Section 29 and Section 35 of the DPA for fraud investigations.
- Automated Communications
- Proactively Tackle Fraud
- Substantial Deterrence
- Additional Income
How it works
Step 1
Single Person Discount Review
Conduct a Single Person Discount Review with Datatank to examine your base and generate uncollected revenue where claimant eligibility has changed.
Step 2
Analysis - Identifying Fraud
Datatank will perform a detailed analysis on the claimants who responded requesting to keep their single person discount. At this point, we risk profile the probability that the household is occupied by more than one person’
Step 3
Challenge - Managed Communications
Datatank takes additional workload off the Council by initiating and managing communication with claimants who've been categorised as high risk. Communication is deferred to the same method used in their response to the SPD Review.
Step 4
Referral - Processing Results
There are typically three outcomes from this process, 1) no response, 2) conceding fraud, or 3) challenging Datatank' evidence.
Where there is no response or an admission of fraud, we provide this information to the Council so a rebill can be initiated. Where a claimants provides evidence supporting the discount, we refer these to the Council for further investigation.
Generate an additional 27% revenue and
proactively tackle fraud
SMART Referrals have enabled us to implement a process whereby all SPD claims are validated in a timely manner and followed up if anomolies are found... Consistently giving us the expected returns on our investment.
