Recommendation 13

The Department was responsible for a substantial component of government’s overall financial response to the pandemic, resulting in the third-largest estimated lifetime costs of any department, as reported by the National Audit Office’s COVID-19 cost tracker.46 We have previously reported that government prioritised speed when designing and implementing measures to limit the damage to the economy and people’s livelihoods from the impact of the coronavirus pandemic, launching schemes in a matter of weeks.47 This approach presented its own risks, and the Department acknowledged that it expected some potential recipients of funding for COVID-19 business support schemes would attempt to defraud the exchequer, and that it chose consciously to tolerate this following ministerial directions48 to proceed.49 However, there are high levels of fraud in some of these schemes, and the request for the Bounce Back Loans Scheme ministerial direction, for example, did not attempt to quantify the potential fraud exposure, or identify who the perpetrators of fraud might be, despite flagging the risk as ‘very high’.50