From Brighton to Canberra – A Prevention Journey
When I walked through the grounds of The Royal Pavilion for an interview to be a trainee investigator at the United Kingdom’s Brighton & Hove City Council in the late 1990s, I felt very nervous. I knew fraud would open up a whole new career, but I never anticipated that 30 years later it would lead me to Canberra!
My own journey has been in many respects a mirror of the way the wider profession has also evolved: from an individual reactive fraud investigator into a more rounded counter-fraud professional. That is the critical need – to recognise and respond to fraud much more effectively and holistically with a greater focus on fraud risk and prevention. But there will always be a need for investigation, of course!
Moving through my career, with 15 years at Westminster City Council leading the fraud team there, becoming a financial investigator and finally leading multiagency disruption teams to stop organised mass fraud claims for welfare, I really started to appreciate the need to disrupt and stop these claims before they started. The other challenge was, for example, having stopped 40 claims in one building, how did you put a figure on how much further loss you may have prevented?
At the time there were no other models we could draw on and fraud was neither a recognised stand-alone function or profession. Therefore, we looked at the average length of life of a claim and used that to develop a model to apply a value to that intervention and how much longer the claim would have run without it (37 weeks if memory serves).
It was around this time that the Cabinet Office and its new ‘Centre of Expertise for Counter Fraud’ came to speak with us and our ‘Fraud Tsar’ at Westminster. As a result, I became aware of the initial moves to recognise counter fraud as its own profession and a recognised function in the new matrix-based management model for the UK government. The development of consistent standards for counter-fraud to apply across government that included fraud risk and measurement were a revelation!
I was sold! So I quickly made efforts to move into the Cabinet Office and build on my now decades of investigative experience. Those early experiments with trying to quantify fraud savings now allowed me to work on a cross-government basis with analysts and auditors to properly develop savings methodologies to assess preventative savings values. I also lead the development of capability via the new Government Counter Fraud Profession beyond the traditional disciplines of investigation and intelligence. This contributed to building a broader and deeper approach to counter-fraud that again reflected my lived experience.
And that’s what brings me to Canberra. Following on from the success of previous secondments, most recently involving the publication of the new international Fraud Loss Measurement Framework, we can take this next step and develop a model to quantify and value savings from preventative activity more broadly and consistently.
The aim is to develop a model that not only demonstrates the value of interventions to stop ongoing losses, but the value of building in up-front prevention that will reduce losses from the outset.
Combining the trailblazing work of both the PSFA and Commonwealth Fraud Prevention Centre, such as pressure testing, fraud personas and the prevention panel, we will be able to take this to the next level. This will allow us to build a robust, evidence-based model to demonstrate the value of investing in fraud prevention from the get-go that can be applicable across jurisdictions.
For more information about the new Fraud Savings Measurement project contact info@counterfraud.gov.au.
Author: David Whitehouse-Hayes – Public Sector Fraud Authority