Council Tax (Unoccupied Properties – Broadcast)

Submitted by intec on Tue, 10/08/2010 - 13:49

Our research has shown that there are around 26 million household properties in the UK today. The national average for unoccupied properties is around 4.06% (1,055,600 properties). Many of these (approx. 80%) will be owned by people claiming ‘unoccupied property’ discount on their council tax bills.

This means that there could be as many as 738,920 properties in the UK claiming discount. Our research suggests that around 7% of these will be fraudulently declared as unoccupied.

With an average council bill of £1,438.72 per year, it means there is approximately £72 million in council tax not being paid across the country.

In the current economic climate where councils are facing budgets cut, your organisations revenue is more important than ever. INTEC’s council tax project can quickly and easily provide you with a list of possible fraudulently occupied properties.

INTEC has created a simple project that will quickly and effectively identify properties that are potentially occupied using our Voice Junction system.

This is how the project works

Step .1.	Your council tax team provide INTEC with a simple excel/csv file containing all the unoccupied property address register on your system
Step .2.	INTEC carry out a data-matching exercise against our national contact database and identify any addresses with a register phone number
Step .3.	You will then be asked to decide on the message you want to use for your broadcast. A good example of which has been... "Hello, this is an automated test of your land line. You have not been charged for this phone call" The key thing to remember is that the message is not really important, at this stage all we are interested in how the call is answered!
Step .4.	We can now discuss the date and time of your 2 broadcasts. These are normally at least 1 week apart and normally run between 18:00 and 20:30
Step .5.	Once we have carried out the first broadcast you will provided with a detailed report showing the numbers called and the outcomes from these calls. These will be broken down into various categories; Positive Hits Answered by Human Busy Answered Medium Hits Answered by Answer-phone Answered by Fax Machine Negative Hits Invalid Number No Answer
Step .6.	A second broadcast is carried out at a later date, agreed with you, and a similar report is produced after that to show the results from this call.
Step .7.	Once both broadcasts have been sent we produce a detailed reports combining the results of the two broadcast. These are ranked in order of importance indicates 2 positive hits indicates 1 positive/1 medium indicates 1 positive/ 1 negative indicates 2 medium hits indicates 1 medium/ 1 negative hit indicates 2 negative hits