Whitehall fraud pilots save £12m

Not a very big dent

"The government has said that three pilot projects aimed at tackling the £21bn lost each year through fraud and error have delivered £12m worth of savings in their first few months

Applying these techniques across all departments could identify and recover £264m on just one year of spending, it believes."

It's obviously better than no savings, but a possible £264m out of a total £21,000m of fraud? That's a small dent in a massive problem. £21bn fraud each year?! That's a staggering £350 per head of population!

Would you put up with that level of error in any other spending?

The really sad thing is...

that I used to work at a company that demonstrated some anti-fraud stuff in the early days of "joined up government". And it actually worked. And the boys from the cabinet office were impressed.

Right until they found out the size of our company and the amount of money we wanted. Apprently we were too small, and not charging anywhere near enough money (bearing in mind we already thought of this, so thought of another, bigger number, and then added a suitably ridiculous multiplier.)

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Let's keep things in proportion, the savings realized are about 1% of the figure offered by the Gov, which is probably inflated so let's say it's a 2% saving. Although it's nice to have this money back, excuse me if I don't cum in my pants just yet.

Just getting Philip Green (one person!) to pay his taxes properly would net more than that every year. Hang the bastards.

Who pays?

"The government has said that three pilot projects aimed at tackling the £21bn lost each year through fraud and error have delivered £12m worth of savings in their first few months."

Who pays how much to set up yet another Quango (remember how the shiny-headed one promised to get erid of them?) .

The department will probably be axed within two years having recovered £30 mill at a cost of £50 mill.

Thats how much is saved, now much much does it COST

Only half the figures here, as usual.

If the government are serious about transparency, they need to tell us how much it costs to setup and run the new "Taskforce on Fraud, Error and Debt" (T'FED?)

I mean, it's great delivering £12m of savings, but if it costs £18m to setup new offices, new compute infrastructure, and management teams of analysts and investigators, that's actually a LOSS of £6m.

Mind you I'd rather that the government was employing staff to stop fraud, than handing out cash to workshy Chavs and terrorists. It won't change the amount we have to pay ultimately.