A new team of experts will surge into departments to help prevent
fraud in public services.
The team, which starts work today, is the latest tool in the
government’s £1bn crackdown on fraud against the public sector,
led by the Public Sector Fraud Authority (PSFA).
The new service will provide expert advice and support to help
departments and public bodies to better understand how fraudsters
attack government schemes and services and take action to make
those attacks less likely to succeed.
It will deploy teams of experts into critical points, such as
when the government announces new spending programmes or
policies, to scrutinise and improve oversight of spending before
funds are issued, to ensure that fraudsters cannot profit from
the public purse.
The team is made up of counter-fraud experts, who have had
specialist training and are experienced in preventing and
detecting fraud. They will help services to harness the latest
tools and techniques, such adopting a fraudsters mindset to
stress test fraud controls, in a similar way to how ethical
hacking operates, to strengthen the government’s fraud defences.
Cabinet Office Minister said:
“We know that fraudsters, both in the UK and overseas, are
targeting public funds and so we must do everything we can to
stop them.
“The public expects us to protect taxpayers money, so this new
service steps up the government’s fraud defences through more
rigorous identification of the threats we face and specialist
support for public services.”
The Risk, Threat and Prevention Service is a global first, with
no other government in the world currently providing such a
cross-government resource and capability to identify and counter
fraud.
It will develop new tools for government to use, including the
Global Fraud Risk Assessment, which will track and analyse common
fraud patterns so that teams can ensure that services are
designed in a way which does not leave them exposed to
fraud.
The team will also develop a High Fraud Risk Portfolio which will
identify the areas of the public sector most at risk of fraud.
This will enable departments to better prioritise the allocation
of counter fraud resources and expert advice, so that fraud risks
are mitigated more efficiently.
These new tools will allow the government to better target
counter-fraud resource. The Risk, Threat and Prevention Service
will lead fraud squads, which will surge into departments, to
analyse and design services which are far less open to the risk
of fraud.
This early intervention will help ‘design out’ fraud at the early
stages of a new government service or policy starting, preventing
the need for investigators to have to try and recoup money in the
future. The savings delivered by the new team will help deliver
the Prime Minister’s commitment to growing the economy, by
reducing public money lost to fraud and ensuring funding reaches
the services it is intended for.
The service has been built over the past eight months. The
government appointed Mark Cheeseman OBE, an internationally
recognised expert, as the Authority’s first Chief Executive last
week.
He said:
“Across the world fraud is getting more complex and pervasive,
but we know that the investment in understanding and
preventing fraud pays off.
The creation of the new Risk, Threat and Prevention Service, a
first for the government, will help us to continue innovating,
and improving, across the system at finding, fighting and
stopping fraud.”
Government has invested £1bn in taking action against public
sector fraud in this spend review period, and has recovered more
than £3.1bn of fraud losses in the last two years, including
within Covid-19 schemes. Significant progress has been made by
establishing the PSFA which is stepping up the government’s
efforts to protect taxpayers' money. Government continues to
expand its Counter Fraud Profession, develop new technologies and
boost skills and training to further protect the public
purse.
