03
June
2014
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00:00
Europe/Amsterdam

Coactiva helps Orbit South prevent tenancy fraud and save £1m

Orbit SouthCoactiva, part of the Callcredit Information Group has been instrumental in Orbit South’s crackdown on tenancy fraud and provided the insight needed to prevent fraudulent acts and achieve around a £1m saving.

With the insight provided by Coactiva’s ThreeSixty solutions, Orbit South, part of the Orbit Group one of the largest housing organisations in the country, has been able to prevent six cases of payment fraud at a cost of £6,000 per property, recover 32 properties between August 2013 and March 2014 with an overall saving of £475,000 and prevent six cases of fraudulent right-to-buy applications saving £441,000 in discounts.

The housing organisation has also recovered £10,400 of arrears through fraud investigations, identified two fraudulent acts of succession of tenancy, freeing up properties for the local authority to allocate - saving them approximately £36,000 pa. In excess of £100,000 of housing benefit fraud has also been detected by Orbit, and referred on to the local authority.  Orbit has also achieved success in tracing individuals and has around 100 on going cases which it is investigating further. 

Mark Connolly, Tenancy Fraud Officer, Orbit South said: “Prior to working with Coactiva we didn’t have a solution in place to tackle tenancy fraud.  Now we are able to not only help prevent fraud taking place at application, we can review existing properties we manage.  This capability has provided significant savings to Orbit, not just financially through recouping costs but through saving time and implementing a more strategic approach to dealing with cases. It has also enabled us to ensure that the properties we manage are let to those with a genuine need for social housing.”

Whilst the government is taking a tougher stance on tenancy fraud and housing Minister Kris Hopkins has ‘warned tenancy fraudsters that the net is closing in’ it is clear that more support is needed to help stamp out tenancy fraud. According to the National Fraud Authority’s fraud indicator for 2013 £20.6 billion per annum is the estimated value of fraud against the Public sector of which, 845 million per annum is attributed purely to tenancy fraud targeting local authorities and 919 million per annum targeting housing associations. 

Andrew Davis, Director of Public Sector, Coactiva said: “Tenancy fraud has always been an issue but over the years has increased.  It is estimated that across England that 98,000 social homes are being unlawfully occupied and in some inner London boroughs cases of social housing fraud are as high 1 in 20 properties. This could be costing taxpayers as much as £1.8 billion a year.  Offenders have become even more sophisticated making the job of identifying the fraud and the fraudsters even more difficult.  

“Thanks to our two products ThreeSixty Tenant View and ThreeSixty Online Orbit South has been able to detect fraud amongst existing tenants, monitor existing tenants for change of circumstances and prevent fraudulent applications and allocations. We are delighted to have been able to help Orbit South achieve such great results.”