DWP audit of PIP assessment reports, Digi Mart USA News: The Department for Work and Pensions (DWP) has admitted that the auditors it used to check the quality of benefit assessment reports were seconded from the same private sector companies that carried out those assessments.
DWP has previously insisted that it sets outsourcing companies such as Capita and Maximus “challenging targets” and monitors their performance “closely” to ensure claimants receive “the highest quality service”. It says this is done through an “independent audit team” which its assessment contracts describe as “external to the Provider and the Affiliates of the Provider”.
A report obtained by Disability News Service (DNS) through a freedom of information request, however, reveals that the healthcare professionals DWP uses to audit random samples of reports are on secondment from the same assessment providers they are auditing. The revelation casts doubt on years of audits that have shown reductions in sub-standard reports, and raises further questions about the relationship between DWP and the insurance and outsourcing industries.
DWP released the report, completed in March 2021, only after it was ordered to do so by the Information Commission. The report examined the quality of personal independence payment (PIP) assessments carried out by phone and was completed by the Government Internal Audit Agency (GIAA).
It was commissioned after a internal process review into the death of, or possibly serious harm caused to, a PIP claimant found their assessment had not been of the “required standard” and that available evidence was “not considered when [the] decision was made”. Despite those concerns, the GIAA report, completed under the last Conservative government, concluded that effective processes were in place to assure the quality of PIP telephony assessment reports and that the framework of governance, risk management and control was “adequate and effective”.
The report made one recommendation and acknowledged that DWP and its assessment providers, at the time Capita and Atos, were “working collaboratively to improve the quality of PIP assessment reports”. It also stated that the internal audit team “assesses the quality of PIP assessment reports using health professionals seconded from APs [assessment providers] for up to two years, to quality check a random sample of assessment reports”, with results fed back to providers who could challenge them.
Concerns about the quality of assessment reports by firms including Capita, Maximus and previously Atos stretch back more than a decade. Many deaths of disabled claimants have been linked to inadequate and error-ridden reports, and it had been assumed that DWP used an independent audit system to push providers to improve.
The report obtained by DNS indicates that was not the case.
Campaigner John Slater, who previously used freedom of information laws to scrutinise DWP’s assessment audits, described the use of seconded provider staff to audit those same providers as “outrageous”. He said he was told by DWP in 2019 that the independent audit was carried out by the department itself, adding that “there’s nothing independent about the DWP auditing its own work”.
DWP is currently testing changes to its audit system. A DWP source told DNS last month that the changes could cause the department to miss safeguarding and other serious errors, with potentially fatal consequences, and would benefit contractors Serco, Capita, Ingeus and Maximus.
DNS asked DWP whether it would continue to use healthcare professionals from assessment providers under the new regime, whether it believed its existing audit regime could be called independent, and whether it stood by the results of years of “independent audits”. After repeated delays, DWP said: “We take quality very seriously and all assessments are carried out by health professionals in accordance with set standards and governance requirements.”
