Most public bodies do not even know how much fraud takes place in their organisations, according to the National Audit Office (NAO), and cannot demonstrate that they have the correct level of counter fraud resources in place to tackle the problem. Only four organisations measure the return on investment from counter-fraud activity.  

This means that ‘government does not have a methodology for establishing the return on its counter-fraud and corruption investment as a whole, and does not know that it has invested the right amount or that its investment is in the right areas’, the NAO report said.

The amount of fraud in government expenditure reported in the accounts audited by the NAO rose from £5.5bn in the two years before the pandemic (2018-19 and 2019-20) to £21bn in the following two years.