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By Tony Hallett, 13 February 2003 16:53

NEWS The UK's public health service's Counter Fraud Service (NHS CFS) has turned to software company SAS Institute in its effort to cut down on the numbers of people ripping it off. The NHS CFS was set up in 1998 and uses a framework based on creating a culture where fraud is unacceptable, there are deterrents in place and there are the means to investigate and catch abusers. Peter Dorrington, head of fraud solutions at SAS UK, said: "They want to go beyond an intelligence-led approach to look at actual data. This was previously held up by the use of paper-based systems." Data mining technology from the US business intelligence software company will be used. The idea is that data will be extracted, merged with other data - for example from the electoral roll - stored and then analysed by an alert engine, detecting patterns of abuse based around a set of rules. Lord Hunt, Minister for Health, said: "We aim to learn from every example of fraud so that we continuously improve our capacity to detect and stop it." Since 1999, the NHS CFS has prevented an estimated £61m of fraud, and the latest push will target pharmaceutical, dental and optical fraud. Also today the National Audit Office put a £2bn figure on the cost of benefit fraud to tax-payers each year, blaming the lack of use of computers to combat such crime. SAS US didn't put a value on its contract with the NHS but said it will be "a tiny proportion of the fraud it will uncover". That is thought to be an indication of how large the problem is at Europe's largest organisation as opposed to how small the deal might be.