In our first year, quite quickly, we had the value-for-money review by the National Audit Office. Now, this is most unusual for an organization of our size in its first year, but obviously given the political sensitivities of what we do, there was a lot of interest in that.
The National Audit Office, if I recall—I'm afraid I don't recall all the detail now—gave us a pretty good report, and we were very pleased with that. But it did make a number of suggestions. An example was how we validate claims. When we started—and you may not be surprised, given why we were created—those individual claims were checked two or three times to make sure we got it right. Over time we've streamlined that, and one of the things that the NAO has been very keen to see us doing is to use a much more risk-based approach to the validation of claims. So with the fairly bog standard claims with a low risk, you don't need to spend too much time on those, but what you can do is audit them later. And we're doing a lot more of that now, where our audit team takes a look at patterns and outliers and things like that, and that picks up some of the more unusual claims. But yes, we've been pretty heavily scrutinized.
