News

Our fourth newsletter celebrates the end of 2020 - our year of delivery - and what a year it has been.

During International Fraud Awareness Week (15-20 November 2020), we ran five capability building webinars to help Commonwealth entities strengthen their counter fraud knowledge and expertise.

Find out what we have achieved throughout 2020 and our plan for the first half of 2021. Learn about new tools now available to support your counter fraud activities.

Dr Russell G Smith is retiring as a Principal Criminologist at the Australian Institute of Criminology in November 2020. Throughout his career, he has been a strong supporter of the counter fraud community. We were lucky enough to ask him some questions about his career and plans for the future.

Between November 2019 and March 2020, the Centre conducted the Fraud Capability Baseline Assessment Project to capture statistics on counter fraud capability across 19 Commonwealth programs and functions. The assessments also helped participants to understand more about their fraud risks and opportunities for capability building.

Find out what the Centre has been working on in this last quarter and what new tools are now available to support your counter fraud activities. This quarter the Centre began to return to business as usual after being part of the COVID-19 Taskforce.

Read some interesting articles and learn about the Centre's achievements this quarter.

Mark Cheeseman from the UK Cabinet Office shares the lessons he learnt from fighting fraud during a global pandemic. He discusses having a structure for a fraud risk assessment, understanding the environment and acting with common purpose, having the fraud conversation and having it with integrity, post event reviews and getting money back, and breaking out of our silos and sharing.

Explore the latest quarterly newsletter from the Commonwealth Fraud Prevention Centre.

The Australian Government acts fast to support Australians. It established the National Bushfire Recovery Agency to support bushfire victims and introduced many measures to support Australians during the COVID-19 pandemic. However opportunistic fraudsters are taking advantage of this quick action. In response the Centre has developed some key guiding principles to help reduce fraud during a rapid response.