Recommendation 13

In our report in June 2021, we recommended that HM Treasury and the Cabinet Office set out how they would ensure that departments implemented a zero-tolerance approach to fraud and error following the pandemic and ensure taxpayers’ money was recovered.28 We therefore asked HM Treasury what it was doing to recover money which had been paid due to fraud or error. HM Treasury told us that it had “put a lot more of [its] investment in the detection and recovery side of [its] fraud activities”.29 It explained that as a result of recent investment, HM Revenue & Customs had over 1,200 people dedicated to collecting this money. It explained that it expected this investment to have a “significant return” but admitted that, although it was monitoring this regularly, it did not yet have a good enough sense of “what that would actually mean in pounds and pence”.30 It confirmed, however, that it would not write-off this money until it had “pursued every single opportunity to recover it”.31 27 Q 30 28 Committee of Public Accounts, Fraud and Error, Ninth Report of Session 2021–22, HC253, 24 June 2021 29 Q 31 30 Q 31 31 Q 32 14 COVID-19 cost tracker update 3 Learning lessons from government’s response to COVID-19