Reasons not to vote Labour #67 - Individual learning accounts
Posted by Christie Malry on April 27, 2010 at 10:04 am
Individual Learning Accounts were supposed to make it easier to get skills training, by giving everyone a personal account, into which they would pay some money and the government would top it up.
Only a few naughty people worked out fairly fast that a government and its money are soon parted.
As the National Audit Office's report into the fiasco describes:
Fraud, abuse, mis-selling and poor value for money were possible under the following circumstances:
- providers legitimately registered people as having enrolled for courses, but subsequently accessed the account without the knowledge of the account holder in order falsely to register them as having started the learning. Individuals subsequently wishing to undertake learning then found that they could not do so because their accounts were empty;
- providers trawled the ILA database and improperly accessed accounts which had not been used, ‘enrolled’ the account holders on learning programmes and subsequently falsely registered them has having started the learning;
- providers offered incentives to people to open accounts for specific learning programmes and falsely registered them as having started learning;
- providers packaged courses with others to justify higher course fees reclaimable from the scheme;
- providers legitimately enrolled people and claimed for learning, but did not provide any learning at all, or issued materials of an inferior quality or not fit for purpose.
We still don't even know how much money was lost fraudulently. According to the BBC:
The total cost of the scheme was £268m - but there is no figure for how much of this might have been stolen, because it remains unclear how many of the 2.6m accounts opened were genuine.
In other words, so staggeringly incompetent, that they don't even know how much money they lost to fraud.
[...] This post was mentioned on Twitter by Christie Malry. Christie Malry said: New blog post: Reasons not to vote Labour #67 - Individual learning accounts http://bit.ly/bRElcl #ge2010 [...]
Hah. I actually did the security analysis for the FT article back in 2002 (so one FT journo can break the nym - if their memory is good enough.) The NAO report is incorrect - you didn't need to "trawl the ILA database and improperly accessed accounts which had not been used". All you needed was one legitimate number, used or unused, then you could trivially predict off in to the future. And then enroll etc, etc.
Thanks for this.
SE is much to shy to cross-refer to his own blog. But I will happily do so - it's an excellent analysis of just how diabolically bad the security over the ILA system was.
Check it out here.
[...] then hoses it around to any Tom Dick and Harry with a training course. Haven't we seen the problem with this [...]