§ Mr. FieldTo ask the Secretary of State for Social Security when his Department began the programme to check the veracity of national insurance numbers; when the programme is expected to end; how many numbers(a) have so far been checked and (b) remain to be checked; and how many of the numbers so far checked have been identified as bogus. [113630]
§ Mr. Rooker[holding answer 9 March 2000]: A programme to check the correctness of accounts held on the Departmental Central Index (DCI) was set up on 6 November 1995 and is currently expected to run until March 2001. Since the start of the programme all accounts held on DCI have been continually scanned.
By May 1999 of the 81 million National Insurance accounts currently held on the Departments computer index about 1 million (1.23 per cent.) had certain types of anomalies (e.g. incorrect address format, two accounts showing the same identity details etc). These were further checked and about 750,000 (0.93 per cent.) were found to be inaccurate.
These can be broken down into 645,000 (0.8 per cent.) which were identified as duplicate cases caused by faulty information or inputting error and have since been deleted and approximately 100,000 cases which have been investigated and corrected.
Of the total in only 11 cases has it been established that the account was deliberately created in order to establish a false identity and fraudulently gain access to benefits. We are currently re-running the initial scans and designing new scans to identify any further "at risk" accounts on the index.