Fraud investigator's comments about UK Government operations 'shutting down' are rejected

A UK Government department has rejected comments by a council fraud investigator that its fraud operations had ceased during the coronavirus crisis.

Jeff Fish, of Swansea Council, told an audit committee that the Department for Work and Pensions' counter fraud and compliance directorate team had been moved to help process the huge rise in universal credit applications during lockdown.

The DWP is responsible for welfare, pensions and child maintenance policy. Councils like Swansea work with the DWP on certain fraud cases, like housing benefit fraud.

Swansea fraud investigator Jeff Fish was asked at a council audit committee if his team was working closely with the DWP during the coronavirus crisis.

Mr Fish said the "the fraud function of the DWP has shut down completely".

He said: "All of their fraud resource has been directed into universal credit support, so their CFDC (counter fraud and compliance directorate) team as they are known, at a local and national level, cease to function.

"We had official notification about four weeks ago."

Mr Fish said his team was continuing to refer cases into a national referral system, but would also looking into whether it could pick up some of this work itself.

"Because my concern is some of that work will end up in a very big black hole and never be picked up on the other side," he said.

Earlier in the meeting, Mr Fish said the UK had 53 different schemes supporting businesses and people worth £540 billion as of last month, meaning that only a small percentage of fraudulent claims would be very costly to the public purse.

He said: "The Cabinet Office have made it clear that while they will not tolerate fraud, we do have to change our approach.

"Our focus may be in terms be of obtaining recovery rather than taking clear criminal action against these people."

Referring to Mr Fish's comments about fraud resources being moved to universal credit and ceasing to operate, a  spokeswoman for the DWP said the department did not recognise these claims.

“We continue to monitor benefit fraud very closely and will relentlessly pursue the minority attempting to abuse the system using the full range of available powers, including prosecution through the courts," he said.

“Our detection systems make use of increasingly sophisticated techniques to identify discrepancies and thwart those seeking to rip off taxpayers."

The spokesman added: “Our focus in this emergency has rightly been on getting money to those who need it and thanks to the extraordinary efforts of staff, since mid-March we’ve managed to process more than two million new claims for universal credit.”