Tuesday, November 15, 2022
Home office failing on fraud
The Guardian reports on findings by the National Audit Office that the Home Office has an incomplete and out-of-date grasp of the cost of fraud in the UK and a poor understanding of who commits the crime.
The paper says that the government's current estimate of the cost of fraud to individuals is based on data and prices from six years ago and that that the Home Office has no reliable estimate of the cost of fraud to businesses, or how much firms spend on tackling the crime:
Fraud made up 41% of crime in the year to June 2022 and 987,000 fraud offences were recorded by police in England and Wales.
However, only a fraction of fraud cases end with a criminal charge or summons to appear in court – 4,816 in the year ending March 2022.
The NAO report said: “The [Home Office] does not have a complete or up-to-date estimate of the cost of fraud to the economy.
Its most recent estimate of the cost of fraud to individuals is £4.7bn [in 2015-16 prices]. This is based on 2015-16 data and the department is currently working on a more up-to-date estimate.
“It does not have any reliable estimate of the cost of fraud to businesses. It also has a limited understanding of the perpetrators of fraud or those who enable it by their action or inaction.”
The NAO also found that the Home Office did not have a complete picture of what was being spent on tackling fraud by businesses or the public sector.
There were also “inherent tensions” between the government and the private sector over some anti-fraud schemes that could “slow the customer journey”.
The head of the NAO, Gareth Davies, said: “Five years on from our last report on this subject, the Home Office has taken limited action to improve its response to fraud.
“Its approach has lacked clarity of purpose, it does not have the data it needs to understand the full scale of the problem, and it is not able to accurately measure the impact of its policies on this growing area of crime.
Given the way that the government itself was taken for a ride during the pandemic on the supply of PPE, you would think that they might have learnt their lesson by now.
The paper says that the government's current estimate of the cost of fraud to individuals is based on data and prices from six years ago and that that the Home Office has no reliable estimate of the cost of fraud to businesses, or how much firms spend on tackling the crime:
Fraud made up 41% of crime in the year to June 2022 and 987,000 fraud offences were recorded by police in England and Wales.
However, only a fraction of fraud cases end with a criminal charge or summons to appear in court – 4,816 in the year ending March 2022.
The NAO report said: “The [Home Office] does not have a complete or up-to-date estimate of the cost of fraud to the economy.
Its most recent estimate of the cost of fraud to individuals is £4.7bn [in 2015-16 prices]. This is based on 2015-16 data and the department is currently working on a more up-to-date estimate.
“It does not have any reliable estimate of the cost of fraud to businesses. It also has a limited understanding of the perpetrators of fraud or those who enable it by their action or inaction.”
The NAO also found that the Home Office did not have a complete picture of what was being spent on tackling fraud by businesses or the public sector.
There were also “inherent tensions” between the government and the private sector over some anti-fraud schemes that could “slow the customer journey”.
The head of the NAO, Gareth Davies, said: “Five years on from our last report on this subject, the Home Office has taken limited action to improve its response to fraud.
“Its approach has lacked clarity of purpose, it does not have the data it needs to understand the full scale of the problem, and it is not able to accurately measure the impact of its policies on this growing area of crime.
Given the way that the government itself was taken for a ride during the pandemic on the supply of PPE, you would think that they might have learnt their lesson by now.
