The United Kingdom’s steep aid cuts and the disruptive scrapping of its development department have been blamed for a failure to tackle fraud, according to a watchdog’s scathing report.
Just £2.2 million ($2.8 million) of fraud was found in 2020-2021 from an aid budget of £9.9 billion — a 0.02% detection rate way below the estimate that between 0.5% and 5% is the true loss in any government spending. The Public Sector Fraud Authority “considers reporting of ‘near zero’ levels of fraud to be an indicator of poor value for the taxpayer because it shows that either fraud is not being found or that controls are so tight that the quality of delivery is compromised,” according to a report published Tuesday.
The report’s author, the Independent Commission for Aid Impact — a group that scrutinizes U.K. aid spending — pins much of the blame on cuts to monitoring and training, revealing that fraud liaison officers, or FLOs, in countries receiving aid, spend only 10% of their time in the role.