Who are they? The counter fraud function brings together around 13,000 officials who work to find and tackle the estimated £33bn that is lost to fraud, bribery, corruption and wider economic crime across the public sector. It aims to enable collaboration within – and across – organisations so they can share best practice and ensure efficient and effective working. The counter fraud profession has more than 7,000 members across 70 organisations in the civil service and its ultimate goal is to develop a common approach for those working in counter fraud. Members gain recognition and credibility for their specialist skill set, but also have access to the standards, guidance and products to help them develop their career. Both the function and the profession are run by the Public Sector Fraud Authority, which was launched in 2022 as the government’s centre of expertise for the management of fraud against the public sector.
What do they do? Currently, the majority of officials working in counter fraud are investigators. However, since the launch of the profession in 2018, new pathways have been developed, supported by learning and development programmes, in areas such as assessment, measurement and leadership.
Where can they be found? Some 84% of officials in the counter fraud function work for the Department for Work and Pensions or HM Revenue and Customs. Many are in dedicated investigation units and specialist teams, such as HMRC’s Fraud Investigation Service and the Serious Fraud Office.
What is a typical career path like? Before the launch of the profession, there was a sense that people “fell into counter fraud” from other professions such as audit or policing, says function head Mark Cheeseman, who also heads up the PSFA. Through the introduction of an apprenticeship in investigation, as well as training and development in risk measurement and leadership, officials can choose a career path with greater control over their direction of travel, Cheeseman says. Another key feature of a career in counter fraud is that it spans sectors – across public service, policing, financial, retail and so on.
Box 1: View from the top with Mark Cheeseman, head of the counter fraud profession and function and chief executive of the Public Sector Fraud Authority
A stalwart at the Cabinet Office for the last decade, Mark Cheeseman started his career at the Legal Services Commission (now the Legal Aid Agency), working his way up from an admin role to head of counter fraud and investigations. At the Cabinet Office, he has gone on to build the counter fraud function and profession, and more recently built the Public Sector Fraud Authority, which he now runs alongside the profession and function. Cheeseman says the key skills needed to do his job are having fraud expertise, knowing your limitations, and having an understanding of how to work across government, bringing different organisations together to collaborate. He says you also need to understand that fraud is a fast, evolving area and always be thinking about where it is going next.
One of the big challenges facing the profession is moving it towards doing more preventative work. Currently, the vast majority of the profession are investigators. “That shift in bringing out that other side is a huge challenge,” he says. “Not encouraging the finding of fraud, but celebrating the finding of fraud, because as fraud professionals, where we find it, we can then make a difference. We can put in that preventative control so that next time, it doesn’t happen. Whereas if you don’t find it, you can’t. That is a huge challenge. Because how do you make that a good thing while not saying, ‘Oh, it’s all right just for it to happen again and again’?” Cheeseman says his method for tackling challenges like this is to “analyse them, meet them head on and work with people to get through them”. “And that’s one of the great strengths of the civil service,” he adds. “You identify the challenge and there’s so many people with so many different experiences in the system that together you can generally work your way through it.”
Cheeseman has plenty of career highlights to choose between, but says his standout moment came after launching the profession, when an official who had had a 37-year career in fraud wrote in the profession’s journal that they had gone to court in their role as a fraud investigator and been asked to state their standing and experience. “And they said they’d been able to say ‘I’m a member of the government counter fraud profession’, and they felt like after 37 years, they really had a place and they belonged to this bigger effort,” says Cheeseman. His tips for those thinking of working in counter fraud? “Come with passion and that I-can-make-a-difference mentality.”
Which professions do they work most closely with? Pretty much all of them. “The policy profession when designing new policy, the commercial profession if it’s a contract or done through commercial grants, the security profession for internal threats,” says Cheeseman. The counter fraud profession is “pretty interlocked” with most professions, “depending on their position within the process or where they need help,” he adds.
What are they most likely to say? According to Cheeseman, go-to phrases include “fraud is a hidden crime” and “problem, not product”. On the latter, he says: “The temptation can be: ‘What I’d really like is something to solve fraud, a product to solve fraud.’ We’d all want the same, wouldn’t we? A thing we can put on our phone that would stop fraud on our phone. The reality of dealing with fraud and economic crime is you need to understand the problem.” Another mantra is not seeing finding fraud as a failure. “You’ve found it, and you can sort it. That’s great. The challenge with fraud is if it’s not found, it could carry on without being seen,” says Cheeseman.
Linda Hamilton, head of organised crime at HMRC’s Fraud Investigation Service, says a phrase often on the lips of colleagues is: “No one is beyond our reach.” “The tax system applies to everybody and we try to take an approach [whereby] it doesn’t matter how rich you are or where you’re based or how sophisticated you are, if you’re committing tax fraud in the UK, we’ll put our resources towards it,” she says. She adds that jargon is a no-no, and that fraud investigators tend to be “quite direct communicators”.
Box 1: Operational view with Linda Hamilton, head of organised crime at the Fraud Investigation Service, HMRC
Linda Hamilton heads up the organised crime division of the Fraud Investigation Service, a division of HMRC that investigates the most serious fraud cases. FIS makes up a significant chunk of the counter fraud profession – around 3,000 of its 5,000 officials are members. Hamilton started her career as a commercial litigator but says she felt she was “making rich people richer and so I left and joined the civil service”. She held roles in both the Scottish Government and the Northern Ireland Civil Service, mostly focused on tackling economic crime and dismantling organised crime groups, before moving to HMRC in 2021.
She initially led an FIS team investigating offshore, corporate and wealthy taxpayers, before returning to organised crime investigation in her current role. Hamilton says one of the big recent wins for the organised crime unit – which, with 1,500 criminal and civil investigators, is the largest function in FIS – was its £615m deferred prosecution agreement with FTSE 100 company Entain PLC, which owns Ladbrokes.
Hamilton says the key capabilities needed to do her job are leadership skills, resilience and having a real interest and experience in fraud. “I absolutely love it,” she says. Listening is another key skill, “because it is absolutely a team effort to disrupt and dismantle organised crime”. She says FIS is looking for people to join from a range of backgrounds, and that civil service or law enforcement experience is not necessarily essential. “What I’m always looking for is a really good strong attitude and…real potential,” she says. “We will work with them and buddy them up with more experienced people as they go through their career journey to really flourish and to have as big an impact on the problem as they possibly can,” she adds. “This work is difficult, there’s no doubt about it, but it’s also hugely rewarding.”
How are the function and profession being developed? They are fairly young, having been set up in 2018. The UK was in fact the first country in the world to have a counter fraud profession and the first to have a professional standard for fraud prevention. A key focus of the profession since its creation has been building up standards and guidance in newer areas such as risk prevention and the use of data analytics, building on the established capabilities in investigation work. This required creating the first ever government standards for fraud risk assessments and fraud leadership. “That was quite a challenge,” Cheeseman says. “Because everyone’s worked in their own organisations in thinking about these things, you all have a slightly different lens. And I think it’s one of the brilliant things about the civil service that you get that collaborative combined desire to come together to agree that. But it takes time to work it through.”
Cheeseman says he is very proud of how the profession has been developed so far, but adds that there is still more to do, including introducing counter fraud qualifications for risk assessment, prevention and measurement, building up a leadership cadre, making the profession as diverse and inclusive as possible, and bringing in a strong new generation of counter fraud professionals in a field where “quite a lot of colleagues are coming up to retirement”.
What are their priorities at the moment? The main focus for the profession is fraud control, Cheeseman says. “We’ve built structures for investigation and they will need time to bring in other investigators. The focus for the profession is building that counter fraud side so you’ve got something equal there which will help us in that shift, that more proactive element,” he says. The focus for the function is “a bit different”, he says, with outcomes the key. Cheeseman says the function has made “huge progress” in responding to concerns from the National Audit Office and Public Accounts Committee that not many departments had financial outcomes for their fraud work. “Most departments now have financial outcomes, but [the next step is]: how do you build around that and then embed that? So the function are really looking at the impact they’re having and the outcomes they’re delivering, which in a fraud context is a complex area,” he says.