New report shows fraud prevention tactics are working

The Fraud Landscape Report, which examines how government is tackling fraud against the public sector, shows progress has been made since a number of initiatives were put in place in 2013 to identify fraud.

The government has detected fraud loss of £73.6 million, recovered £18.4 million and prevented fraud loss of £33 million. The report shows that this has been achieved by:

• Launching the Counter Fraud Profession;
• Setting government-wide standards to improve consistency across the public sector;
• Actively increasing the use of data sharing and analytics to prevent and detect fraud; and
• Delivering an internal Fraud Initiative, which bans public sector employees dismissed for fraud from working in the public sector for five years.

Minister for the constitution Chris Skidmore said: “The rise in the amount of fraud that has been detected and prevented has been due to the hard work of public sector workers, but there is always more we can do to tackle this scourge which takes money away from hard-working taxpayers.

“Before 2010, government departments were reporting much lower levels of fraud and this is something we should be wary of. Fraud is a hidden crime and from 2010, with the government strengthening activity to look for, identify and report fraud we have seen more of it uncovered.

“The government is coming together to increase its capability to detect and deal with fraud through ground-breaking initiatives such as the creation and adoption of standards and the launch of the government Counter Fraud Profession. These actions demonstrate our strong commitment to successfully tackling fraud.”