Recommendation 13

We asked the Department what its assessment of fraud was amongst these contractual disputes. Although it conceded that some of the 176 contracts were of interest from a fraud perspective it was unwilling to give much information about any specific work it was undertaking beyond stating that it was working closely with internal fraud teams and the broader fraud authorities.35 As with the notion of contractual disputes being commonplace, it also argued that “fraud in contracting is a fact of life” and that the best it could do was to aim to minimise it and recover amounts when fraud is detected.36 When pushed on the timescales for any action that it might eventually take against fraudulent suppliers the Department simply said if that involves going to court then that “takes as long as it takes”.37 It told us that its current assessment is that these PPE contracts have 27 Q13–14 28 Q15 29 Q16 30 C&AG’s Report, Figure 14 31 Q58 32 Q61 33 Q60 34 C&AG’s Report, para 3.8 35 Qq19, 22 36 Q21 37 Q25 12 Management of PPE contracts been no more susceptible to fraud than the average across public sector procurement.38 The NAO reported that this assessment means that PPE fraud could be anywhere within a range of 0.5% to 5.0% of PPE expenditure. On contracts signed by the Department this could mean fraud worth as much as £400 million.39 PPE profits and conflicts of interest