Buying into fraud
The cost of fraud is far higher than previous estimates, and procurement accounts for most of this. With cuts to internal audit and procurement teams focused on savings, local authorities need all the help they can get.
David Cameron’s hosting of the world’s first anti-corruption summit in May certainly sent out a message that fraud was a high priority for the UK government. But the PR coup was overshadowed by the publication of a damning report just two weeks later warning that the scale of fraud across the UK had been woefully underestimated.
The annual cost of fraud in the UK could be as high as £193bn – an average of more than £3,900 per adult in the UK – with the rate of loss at £6,000 per second, according to the 2016 Annual Fraud Indicator, based on research by the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Counter Fraud Studies. This dwarfs previous government estimates of around £50bn in 2013.