Recommendation 13

By February 2021, the Department had identified 76 fraudulent applications, 70 of which had resulted in awards. The Department estimated that up to £614,000 had been distributed to fraudulent applicants and had reported cases equivalent to £400,000 to the police. The remaining £214,000 were still under investigation. The Department estimated that fraud levels could be between 0.5% to 5% across all schemes by the time it has completed all post-award checks, a process it expected to complete in May 2021.45 The Department accepted that its decision to prioritise getting money to charities quickly to meet the extra demand cause by the pandemic increased the potential for fraudulent claims. It stated though that it also had an objective to ensure the money was “distributed in the right way” to try and prevent fraud.46 But it agreed with the Cabinet Office that a “risk mitigation approach” was sensible that allowed it to shift some of its usual upfront checks to post-award instead.47 It said that to-date it had detected fraudulent awards worth £624,000, a £10,000 increase from the value in February 2021, with most of these awards so far in the CCSF, in part as funds were paid out earlier than other schemes and checks on other schemes are ongoing. It explained that the total fraudulent awards were less than 0.5% of the total funds being distributed but there were still many post-award checks to be completed. The Department committed to doing “everything that we can” to recover the money according to the government’s usual approach to clawbacks.48 44 Public Accounts Committee, COVID 19: Bounce Back Loan Scheme, Thirty Third Report of Session 2019–21, HC 687, 16 December 2020 45 C&AG report, paras 1.25–1.26 46 Q87 47 Qq 87–88 48 Qq 88–90 14 COVID-19: Government Support for Charities 2 Understanding the impacts secured from the funding Evaluating the impact of the funding package