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http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/politic ... ehall.htmlExtraordinary tales of fraud and failure in WhitehallBy Sue Cameron 8:40PM GMT 29 Feb 2012 ...
The report, Tackling Fraud and Error in Government, comes from a task force set up by the Coalition a year ago. As I waded through its pages – you need a doctorate in acronyms to get through it – the same question kept repeating itself. Why have the losses been allowed to grow so big? Nobody runs up a shortfall like this overnight. More than £21 billion a year is lost to fraud and a whopping £9.6 billion disappears through mistakes, some of them made by officials. Errors by the public and by civil servants are usually lumped together, so it is hard to tell who is making most of them.
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Not all fraudsters are members of the public. The report talks of “insider-enabled” cheating and of “the diversion of public funds into staff bank accounts”, though the Cabinet Office says there is no indication that insider fraud is prevalent. Nor is it only the poor who cheat. One exercise uncovered £10 million in unpaid tax by dentists and doctors and has led to criminal investigations and a further £2 million in tax being collected.
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Meanwhile, there are rather vague promises about fraud and error being “designed out” of major government projects and programmes, using panels of independent experts. There are also plans to make all officials take one-hour “fraud awareness e-learning” courses. Oh, and Whitehall is finally going to tighten up its vetting procedures for officials. The report reveals that, up to now, there have been no checks on whether staff have previous convictions for fraud.
Some of the work now under way gives cause for hope – in particular the use of IT to cross-check data with outfits such as the Credit Reference Agency. Most important of all, the battle is being waged across the whole of government. Yet Whitehall urgently needs to slim down the number of bodies tackling fraud and error, streamline its efforts and ensure that every department keeps a constant watching brief on fraud and on unnecessary mistakes. It is fair enough for the Coalition to attack Labour for the “billions wasted through fraud, error and uncollected debt”. Yet this should not be a party issue. Questions should also be asked as to why the mandarins did not do more to bring the losses under control before they reached such eye-watering proportions.
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