Fraud investigators at the Ministry of Defence only recovered £2.8m from their internal investigations despite spending £5.7m on counter fraud work in 2024-25, a report by the National Audit Office (NAO) revealed.

The main fraud areas related to procurement problems, misuse of purchasing cards and asset theft from computers to weapons and armoury. But the rate of fraud recovery translates to only 0.004% of the country’s annual £60bn annual defence budget. But the MoD does not have an accurate figure about how much of its annual budget is lost to fraud every year.

The NAO said procurement fraud and theft of assets were ‘key fraud risks’.

The report found that in 2024 the MoD received 2,500 reports about ‘missing assets’, with two-thirds related to losses of items and theft making up only 13%.

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