UK failing to tackle fraud epidemic, warns National Audit Office
The UK government lacks a coherent strategy for tackling fraud and has significant gaps in its understanding of the problem, according to a new report by the National Audit Office (NAO).
The situation has seen action taken against fraudsters drop over the past five years, even as the level of fraud across the economy has increased by 15 per cent.
The NAO said the government lacks current data on the country’s fraud problem and has a limited understanding of its perpetrators, despite it now being the largest category of crime in England and Wales.
It warned the UK also lacks an effective cross-government approach to fighting fraud, and is instead employing a series of overlapping strategies that have failed to achieve desired outcomes.
It noted the UK’s most up-to-date figures on the cost of fraud to individuals are from 2015-16 as it warned there is no data on the cost of fraud to businesses.
The report comes after the NAO in 2017 called for “urgent” action to tackle fraud in warning the problem had been overlooked by the government, law enforcement and industry.
Gareth Davies, the head of the NAO, 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.”