Lord Inglewood – 2015 Parliamentary Question to the Department for Work and Pensions

The below Parliamentary question was asked by Lord Inglewood on 2015-11-05.

To ask Her Majesty’s Government when the social security benefits budget last had a clean and unqualified audit report from the NAO.

Lord Freud

It is the DWP consolidated resource account (not budget) that is audited each year by NAO.

In his certificate of the 2014/15 accounts the Comptroller and Auditor General stated to the House of Commons that, in his opinion, the Department’s financial statements give a true and fair view of the state of the Department’s and the Departmental Group’s affairs as at 31 March 2015.

The consolidated resource account has been given a qualified regularity opinion in each of the years that it has been audited (since 1999-00) because of the level of fraud and error in certain benefits.

The qualification is due to material amounts of fraud & error in benefit expenditure. In the 14/15 accounts this was estimated at 1.9% of benefit expenditure, the eventual outturn was 1.8%.