The Commission has been given new rights to compel public bodies
to provide it with data which it can then compare to other data
sets for the detection of fraud.
Civil liberties activists have objected to the parts of the
Serious Crime Act which awarded some agencies, such as the Audit
Commission, the right to acquire and use more sets of data than
previously.
Liberty said when the law was first published that it allows for
previously illegal general trawls for information rather than
searches specific to an investigation. "New measures include data
matching powers which will allow electronic ‘fishing expeditions’
not based on suspicion or intelligence," said a Liberty
statement.
The Code, though, says that "the Commission will only choose
data to be matched where there is evidence of fraud or potential
fraud".
Gareth Crossman, Liberty's Policy Director said that
investigations themselves were not a problem, but that his
organisation had doubts about data matching as a technique. "Of
course there is no problem with targeted investigations where there
is intelligence about individual fraud. However, 'data matching'
exercises are comparable to fishing expeditions where no suspicion
is necessary before private details are electronically sifted," he
said.
The Code allows the Audit Commission to compel almost any body
which it audits to provide it with data which it can then compare
with other data that it has from that organisation. It identifies
disparities in the data and hopes to discover fraud in that
way.
The Commission's guidance says that the Data Protection Act
applies to it and that "wrongful disclosure of data obtained for
the purposes of data matching by any person is a criminal
offence".
The Serious Crime Act increased the penalties for wrongful
disclosure, introducing the threat of imprisonment for the offence
for the first time.
The new powers given to public authorities to perform data
matching also for the first time allow them to perform comparisons
with sets of data from the private sector, though it cannot compel
banks and building societies to provide the data.
The Commission has published the Code and has invited comments
on it in a consultation process due to close at the end of May. It
said it hopes to put the finalised Code to Parliament in July.
