Recent years have seen plenty of investment in the health care system, the police force, education and other important public arenas. There is no doubt that there has been a lot of improvements made but there has also been a huge amount of waste. Now that sums that can be measured in trillions have been pumped into the decimated economy in order to bail out the failed banking sector there is grave concern that investment into the already inadequately funded fraud regulatory system will be severely cut.

We have seen lawyers’ earnings from criminal fraud cases reduce continually over the years leading to some serious cases being dropped and criminals allowed to walk free. This process is now hitting the forensic accountants who are essential for the proper outcome of most fraud cases. The Legal Services Commission in the UK intend reducing the money paid to experts by 20% in 2010, a disproportionate amount of the overall reductions in public sector funding they have been asked to make.

The police forces face similar funding problems. Such is their burden of target meeting and administrative bureaucracy that they have less time for proper police work than ever. The effects of this cascade down to what are considered to be less important crimes, including fraud, which end up being severely underfunded or even overlooked. Some estimates of the cost of fraud to the UK economy put it at around £100 billion, with the cost to the USA proportionally higher.

How can some 400 full time police officers deal with this level of fraud? Much fraud goes both unreported and un-investigated. Nobody will ever know the full extent. Fraud is a hidden crime and therefore only that which is fully investigated and dealt with is ever fully quantified. The rest passes by unnoticed.

The clever fraudster will often target many thousands of victims each for a few hundreds of pounds. Together the fraud may be worth millions, but each individual loss represents a person with no power or resource to do anything. In some cases the victims band together to finance civil action, but in many cases they simply fade into the background.

There is much talk about the UK’s new National Fraud Reporting Center. Perhaps we will get a better understanding of the amount of fraud that is happening and then maybe we will see the resources put where they can be most effective in reducing the threat of fraud. Funding trained police fraud officers and fully capable forensic accountants to investigate and bring successful fraud prosecutions is the only answer and with the promised harsh cut backs in public funding set to rise it seems that the fraudster may still be safe for a while yet.