Lib Dems Find National Insurance Fiasco

6.02.13pm UTC (GMT +0000) Mon 19th May 2008

Local Liberal Democrats are claiming that based on data produced by the National Audit Office every year 10,000 national insurance returns for people working in Greater Cambridge may not be matched with their records.

The low key publication of the 2006-7 audit of the National Insurance Fund Account during the local elections revealed that across the country non-matched "suspense" files so far contain some 118 million items.

Every year some 1.7 million items are added to these files from companies for their employees, which represent about three per cent of each year's returns.

According to the Greater Cambridge Partnership some 360,000 people are employed in the Greater Cambridge sub region, so there is the possibility that upwards of 10,000 returns from firms in our area are ending up in the pending tray.

Jonathan Chatfield Lib Dem parliamentary spokesperson for South East Cambridgeshire said:

"No press release accompanied the publication of the national insurance annual audit during the local election campaign, so it went unnoticed.

"But this audit shows further big scale Government bungling this time with our national insurance contributions, with millions of returns being unmatched with contributors' records.

"Is there no end to this Government's incompetence, which has to be engrained from decades of mismanagement by both Labour and Tory administrations?"