Public Sector Fraud Authority chief executive Mark Cheeseman speaks to Tevye Markson about improving cross-government capability, tackling insider fraud and modernising counter-fraud work
You’d be hard-pressed to find a civil servant with more influence on the government’s approach to tackling fraud in the last decade than Mark Cheeseman.
From creating the world’s first counter-fraud profession to establishing the first standards on risk assessments, leadership and measuring fraud, Cheeseman has long been at the forefront of the government's efforts to tackle economic crime.
Cheeseman kicked off his career at the then-Legal Services Commission, a Ministry of Justice-sponsored body which ran the legal aid scheme in England and Wales. He joined the LSC after university, working as a filing clerk. Initially based in Nottingham, he worked his way up the organisation and moved to London. Around six years in, he made his first acquaintance with counter-fraud work – in a general operations job – and was immediately hooked.
“As soon as I moved into working in fraud and counter-fraud, I just loved it,” he says. “It was so interesting. It was so engaging. There were so many different disciplines. And it was such an emerging area of business and thought with new techniques and tools. You were trying to push the boundary of that, and that was really fascinating.”
Cheeseman went on to become the LSC’s head of counter-fraud and investigations, and his penchant for pushing the envelope would bring results. His reforms led to the first prosecutions of members of the public for legal aid fraud; the first cross-agency prosecutions with other public bodies; and a fundamental redesign of its fraud risk assessment model.
When the Legal Services Commission was replaced by the Legal Aid Agency in 2013, Cheeseman left to join the Cabinet Office – where he led a small team working with departments to agree cross-government fraud and error policy and implementation.
He went on to create the government counter-fraud profession and counter-fraud function in 2018, and was named interim chief executive of the newly formed Public Sector Fraud Authority in 2022. The following year he took its reins permanently, which he describes as “a huge privilege and pleasure”.
“We're transforming how government deals with fraud. We're modernising it,” he says. Big public sector organisations are being more proactive about preventing fraud, he explains, compared to the more reactive approach taken in the past.
“”You try and understand the risks, understand the ways you'd be attacked,” he says. “You use data and analytics to then try and identify if that's happening in the system or to prevent it from happening. You then use a range of techniques to deal with where that is happening. And that requires a huge diversity of skill sets.” And, because fraud never stays still, Cheeseman says he must constantly "keep in mind the fact that today's answer might not be tomorrow’s”. “It's such a fast-evolving area. We need to always be thinking about where the next step is.”
One challenge currently on his mind is how to make the shift from encouraging the finding of fraud, to “celebrating it”, because it means preventative controls can be put in place to stop it happening again.
Cheeseman says his approach to dealing with challenges is to “analyse them, meet them head on and just work with people to get through them”.
“That’s one of the great strengths of the civil service,” he says. “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.”
Standards-bearer
Building capability across the system has become Cheeseman’s main focus in his time in central government, which he says is “the biggest way we can make a difference”.
“If we build an authority with 150 great people, brilliant. If through the counter-fraud profession we can increase the capability of the 13,000 people working in all the different buildings in Whitehall and out in other parts of the country, then actually that will have a much bigger impact.”
The government counter-fraud function and profession enabled a novel approach to building up capability, one that Cheeseman wishes he’d thought of earlier in his early career – the creation of public sector-wide standards.
“Historically, every individual public body was looking at how they could deal with fraud,” he says. “And there's hundreds of public bodies. And hundreds of local authorities. So everyone was working out, well, how do I do it?
“When I was in legal aid and took over the fraud team, one of the first things I did was ask: ‘What kind of skills do I need here?’ And the way to answer that question for me was to find different people and places – like the police – who I could ask.
“Whereas actually with what we've done in the centre here through the functional agenda, over the past few years, [is] we've built standards. So we have a functional standard, which says the minimum things an organisation should have in place, and then product standards, which says how [good quality products] should look, and then professional standards, so the level of training, knowledge, skills and experience you would expect someone to have in a fraud role.”
The standards, which include "the only standard in the world on how to do fraud risk assessment”, apply to all public bodies and are accessible to all, Cheeseman says.
Had he had access to those resources when he was at the Legal Services Commission, “it would have been so much more efficient”, he says.
Making the counter-fraud profession “as diverse and inclusive as possible and as reflective of the society that it's serving” is another aspect of building capability that Cheeseman is focused on. There are two reasons for doing this, he says.
“One: to make sure it is as effective as possible and rounded as possible, but two: because we have quite a lot of colleagues working across counter-fraud who are coming up to retirement, and we want to bring a new generation through who are really strong.”
The development of a leadership cadre is another key part of his plan to drive capability, and another area where the UK is breaking new ground. “There aren’t qualifications in the private sector for fraud leaders, there aren’t qualifications in other countries for those who are leading fraud responses,” he explains.
There are currently two cohorts of senior civil servants undertaking the Counter Fraud Leadership Programme, the world’s first bespoke counter-fraud leadership programme for senior officials. “Continuing to develop those leaders is a primary focus. That's where we're going to develop capability.”
“The tone from the top is always going to be important,” he adds. “But tone from the top isn't everything. And that's why we need to build capability through the system as well.”
Working with departments
The Public Sector Fraud Authority was built from a small team based in the Cabinet Office.
It now has additional responsibilities, including a greater focus on performance and outcomes across central government and providing an increased depth and breadth of support to public bodies. It also now sits within both the Cabinet Office and the Treasury.
Cheeseman describes his chief exec role as “leading a team of fraud experts who work with public bodies to better understand and reduce the impact of fraud against the public sector”.
“That is very specifically worded,” he says. To reduce the impact of fraud, he explains, “you need to understand it, and it is complex and multifaceted”.
The PSFA works with hundreds of organisations, with a primary focus on ministerial departments and public bodies, but also shares practices and makes standards available to the wider public sector. In its first year – 2022-23 – its work brought in £311m of savings, according to Cabinet Office figures, beating its target of £180m.
“Part of being a fraud expert is knowing that we have a committed and capable adversary in those trying to commit fraud”
One high-profile policy it helped on was the cost-of-living payments that were made by the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy (later the Department for Energy Security and Net Zero) between 2022 and 2024. Cheeseman says the PSFA put a team in of trained fraud risk assessors to help officials in the energy department “understand the risks in that area and the controls they could use”.
The PSFA’s relationship with different bodies “varies hugely”, Cheeseman says. From enabling the ‘heavyweight’ fraud-tackling departments, HMRC and DWP – which have 80% of fraud capability – to help other parts of government; to a more corporate relationship with the Treasury and Cabinet Office, which is focused on “how we, as a combined centre, can drive change”; and then the smaller organisations, “where we will be trying to enable the capability of an individual or a small team”.
While the majority of our conversation has focused on tackling those trying to defraud government from the outside, CSW wonders how worried Cheeseman is about insider fraud within the civil service?
“Part of the role of being a fraud expert is knowing that we have a committed and capable adversary in those trying to commit fraud,” Cheeseman says. “So there will always be an internal fraud risk. And we always need to keep our eyes on it.”
But he adds: “I actually think it’s something that governments have moved a fair way on.” If anyone is found to have committed fraud, their details are recorded in the PSFA’s Internal Fraud Hub and they are banned from working in the civil service for five years. The “vast majority of departments” are part of the hub and there are more than 300 individuals on the register, Cheeseman says.
“So that shows us there is a risk there, but it also shows that we have that control and we're doing stuff. As with all fraud things, we've got to continually try to just get a bit better.”
International collaboration
Alongside his work in the UK, Cheeseman has led the creation of the International Public Sector Fraud Forum, a group of experts on fraud management from the Five Eyes – an Anglosphere intelligence alliance comprising the UK, US, Australia, Canada and New Zealand – who meet to discuss common challenges and share leading practice.
This has provided an opportunity to work collectively on a greater scale. “It helps us understand if we're missing anything, if someone's doing it a different way, and to give the best advice to ministers and other senior officials on that benchmarking data.”
Cheeseman also helped set up and is an adviser to the Australian government’s Commonwealth Fraud Prevention Centre, and has supported the New Zealand government in creating its Counter Fraud Centre. This has led to increased levels of collaboration between the UK and these countries.
Last year, a civil servant in the Australian government’s Commonwealth Fraud Prevention Centre came over on a secondment at the PSFA. During his time in the UK, he built a standard and a process for control testing, a tool he was using in Australia, and a guide on how it could be deployed.
“That is the power of working across boundaries – because we've had this real focus on risk, and they're having this focus on control testing,” Cheeseman says. “And likewise, they're taking our fraud risk assessment [standards]. And someone's just returned back from Australia where they were working on fraud measurement because we've done quite a lot of work on fraud measurement techniques. So we were sharing that over there.”
When discussing his job, Cheeseman rarely uses the past tense. In an area as fast evolving as counter-fraud, it’s clear he is focused on what needs to be done now and next.
But when CSW asks him to reflect on his two-decade career and pick out a highlight, he has plenty to choose from. “One of the great things about working in central government is you're proud of the combined impact of the system and civil servants across the piece and the difference you can see when everyone comes together to work on something commonly,” he says.
He does have a standout moment, however. It came after reading an article by a long-serving official, written for the counter-fraud profession’s journal.
The civil servant in question 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 that they felt like, after 37 years, they really had a place and belonged to this bigger effort,” Cheeseman recalls.
“On reading the draft of that article, I was so proud of the collective endeavour. Because the power there is to make a difference to the taxpayer from that collective effort of empowering people, through showing they are part of a bigger effort, is incredible.”