Putting a lid on procurement fraud will help the economy: UK

At the beginning of November, the UK National Fraud Authority (NFA) produced a report on UK public sector procurement fraud, which concluded that fraud was likely to amount to 1% of total procurement spend – £2.4 billion a year.

Worldwide, the biggest area for fraud is the defence industry and the next biggest is construction.

The NFA has made several recommendations in its report. These include:
• spend recovery audits to detect overpayments to suppliers
• deployment of data analytics to identify anomalous behaviour
• a procurement fraud training module to be developed by the CIPS
• the Efficiency and Reform Group to design fraud risks out of procurement processes
• fraud risk assessments at the start of any major procurement or project

Read more here.