More than 100 people who may be committing housing benefit fraud or wrongly using disabled parking badges are being investigated by the city council.

Each year the council takes part in the National Fraud Initiative, which involves electronically matching up information from different sources to identify possible fraud or irregularity.

For example a list of people claiming the single person's council tax discount can be checked against the electoral roll to see whether more than one person lives at a particular address.

A new report by Leicester City Council shows that the system has uncovered two frauds this year.

Both involved tenancies and in both cases the culprits have been evicted. A further 112 cases are under investigation.

Steve Charlesworth, the council's head of finance. said: "We look at all the information that's available to us and cross-reference it all.

"We're looking for any anomalies. If we spot a potential issue it will be investigated further.

"At first, thousands of potential leads will come up but we gradually narrow these down. Two frauds have been identified so far this year. It's worth doing because it means frauds aren't missed, and it also means every department has to stay vigilant to potential frauds."

This year, for the first time, data can also be matched against death registration to find cases where, for example, concessionary travel passes continue to be issued and used after the beneficiary has died.

The initiative is run by the Audit Commission using information provided by organisations including the NHS, Home Office and Department for Work and Pensions.

A spokesman for the Audit Commission said: "The data matching exercise is designed to alert councils to potential fraud by spotting individuals whose names appear on more than one database in a way which suggests that they may be committing fraud.

"Since the initiative's start in 1996, the programme has helped identify £664 million in fraud or error and the initiative has attracted international recognition.

"It is a sophisticated data matching exercise which matches electronic data within and between participating bodies to prevent and detect fraud."

The Audit Commission expects councils to have investigated the majority of matches by the end of January next year before sending back their findings to feed into a national report.