Ministry of Defence losing 'staggering' £927m to fraud - enough to pay for 170 tanks

Kathryn Westmore of the Royal United Services Institute warned of the "steadily increasing" losses to fraud. She said: “Leaving aside tax fraud and benefit fraud, the MoD is by far and away the Government department that suffers the biggest fraud losses and the statistics show that this has been steadily increasing over the last 10 years. A vast amount of money is lost to procurement fraud in the MoD; in 2021 the Public Accounts Committee said that the MoD’s procurement process was ‘broken’ and it doesn’t seem to have improved much. “That said, there has been a large focus in the public sector on detecting fraud with departments encouraged to actively look for and report fraud. The value of fraud losses and the length of time it takes to complete an investigation are still staggering though.”