A fraud that ran from 2012 to 2015 cost the Ministry of Justice 22 million pounds, and it took a decade to show up in the department's own accounts. Its brand-new five-year strategy to fight fraud does not mention it.
Estimated reading time: 6 minutes
In short. The Ministry of Justice published a five-year Counter Fraud Strategy on 4 September 2026 [1], citing national fraud-and-error estimates from the Public Sector Fraud Authority and the National Audit Office [2]. One of its two cited sources carries a more recent, larger figure than the one the strategy actually quotes, and the department's own audited accounts, published eleven months earlier, disclose a 22 million pound fraud that took roughly a decade to surface and still does not appear in the headline loss total. None of it is in the strategy. Three documented mistakes: four stars.
What the strategy says fraud costs
The Ministry of Justice's mission is stated plainly on page 2: "to develop expertise and promote awareness in fraud prevention, detection and control," in service of a vision "to ensure the MoJ and the justice system is protected as far as possible from the harms caused by fraud, bribery and corruption" (page 2) [2]. Jake Richards MP, the minister who signs the foreword, calls fraud a threat where "every pound lost... is a pound diverted from vital public services" (page 3) [2].
The scale the document sets out for that threat is drawn entirely from two footnoted sources. "It is estimated by the Public Sector Fraud Authority (PSFA) that every year between £39.8bn and £58.5bn of public money is subject to fraud and error. Each Department alone is estimated to lose between 0.5 - 5% of its operating budget to fraud and error" (page 4) [2]. The first figure is footnoted to the PSFA's 2024/25 Delivery Plan, page 7; the second to a National Audit Office overview, page 6.
The other number its own footnote points to
The PSFA's delivery plan does say what the strategy quotes. "Our estimate (including tax and welfare) is that every year between £39.8bn and £58.5bn of public money is subject to fraud and error," drawn from the PSFA's own Fraud Landscape Report of March 2024 (page 7) [3]. But the strategy's second footnote points to a different document making a different, larger claim about the same underlying quantity. The National Audit Office's own overview states that fraud and error cost the taxpayer "£55 billion to £81 billion in 2023-24" (page 6) [4]. That is the more recent of the two figures, produced using the same PSFA methodology the strategy already relies on, and it runs roughly £15bn to £23bn higher across the range than the headline number the strategy actually quotes. The strategy does not mention it.
The second half of the sentence fares worse. The Ministry of Justice attributes "each Department alone is estimated to lose between 0.5-5% of its operating budget" to page 6 of the NAO overview. That page does describe a 0.5% to 5.0% band, but it applies it to roughly £560bn of government-wide spending and income that has never been measured for fraud at all, producing "fraud and error between £3 billion and £28 billion" across the whole unmeasured estimate, not a per-department operating-budget figure (page 6) [4]. The phrase "operating budget" does not appear anywhere in the NAO document, and neither does the Ministry of Justice.
A department with no numbers of its own
What the strategy never cites is the one document that actually does put a number against the Ministry of Justice: the NAO's own overview of the department, published in December 2025, less than nine months before the strategy itself. It records that MoJ had gross expenditure of £15.5 billion in 2024-25, reduced to £13.6 billion net of income (page 3) [5]. Against that budget, the same overview states: "In the financial year 2024-25, there were 17 losses (previous financial year: six) over £300,000, with a total value of £58.5 million (previous year: £16.5 million)" (page 10) [5]: a near-fourfold jump in disclosed losses in a single year.
One of those 17 losses is footnoted separately. "One of the 17 losses recognised in financial year 2024-25 was due to fraudulent activity during 2012 to 2015. The £22 million cost of the fraudulent activity was expensed when it occurred, between 2012 and 2015, and therefore does not appear in the £58.5 million in the financial statements" (page 10) [5]. A fraud that ran for three years was recognised in the department's accounts roughly a decade after it happened, and the department's own published loss figure for the year it was disclosed does not include its cost. The same overview separately records a cyber-attack on the Legal Aid Agency, "crystallising" cyber risk across the MoJ group and creating "potential exposure to claims for damages" (page 3) [5].
None of this, the loss trend, the decade-late fraud, or the Legal Aid Agency attack, appears anywhere in the strategy meant to address exactly this problem for this department. Its own list of "Key Actions" runs to more than thirty bullet points across governance, risk, controls, response, culture and data analytics, and not one of them is a numeric target, a review date, or a commitment to publish progress; the closest thing to a date-bound deliverable in the entire document is "Create control library by 2028," a single item in a checklist (page 6) [2].
The claims, tested
| The claim | What the record shows | Verdict |
|---|---|---|
| "Every year between £39.8bn and £58.5bn of public money is subject to fraud and error," footnoted to the PSFA's delivery plan (page 4) [2] | The strategy's own second footnote, a National Audit Office overview, gives £55bn to £81bn for the same underlying quantity a year later (page 6) [4] | Accurate to its own cited source, but stale next to the strategy's other cited source, which the document never reconciles |
| "Each Department alone is estimated to lose between 0.5-5% of its operating budget," footnoted to the NAO overview, page 6 (page 4) [2] | That page describes a 0.5%-5% estimate applied to £560bn of unmeasured government-wide spend, not departmental operating budgets; "operating budget" and "Ministry of Justice" do not appear in the NAO document at all (page 6) [4] | Misstates the source it cites |
| A five-year strategy "to develop expertise and promote awareness in fraud prevention, detection and control" (page 2) [2] | The department's own NAO-audited accounts, published in December 2025, disclose a decade-late £22 million fraud and a near-fourfold rise in disclosed losses (page 10) [5] | Neither figure, nor any target to improve on them, appears in the strategy |
The mistakes, counted
The strategy quotes an outdated cross-government fraud figure while its own second footnote points to a newer, larger one (1). The £39.8bn to £58.5bn range comes from the PSFA's March 2024 Fraud Landscape Report [3]; the National Audit Office overview the strategy cites in the very next footnote puts the same 2023-24 figure at £55bn to £81bn [4]. The strategy does not flag the gap or explain the choice of the smaller number.
The "0.5-5% of operating budget" claim misstates the National Audit Office page it cites (2). That page describes an extrapolation across unmeasured government-wide spend, not a per-department operating-budget loss rate, and never uses the phrase "operating budget" or names the Ministry of Justice [4].
The strategy sets out no MoJ-specific fraud baseline, no numeric target and no review date, despite the department's own recently-audited history giving it one (3). The NAO's account of MoJ's 2024-25 losses, a near-fourfold rise to £58.5 million and a £22 million fraud that took roughly a decade to surface [5], is absent from the strategy, as is any measurable commitment against it; the single date anywhere in the document's action list is an internal deadline to "create control library by 2028" [2].
Credit where due
The strategy does not invent its own numbers; both cited figures trace to real, published PSFA and NAO work, and the department's underlying accounts were not hidden. The NAO issued the Ministry of Justice an unqualified, true-and-fair audit opinion for 2024-25 even as it disclosed the £22 million historic fraud and the fourfold rise in losses [5]: the disclosure happened in public, in an audited document, which is the system working as intended even where the strategy fails to build on it. The same NAO overview also credits a live example of exactly the kind of work the strategy calls for: a Legal Aid Agency pilot sharing data with HM Revenue & Customs to check around 600 suspected fraudulent legal aid claims, saving an estimated £500,000 (page 10) [5]. The strategy's ambition to "test, pilot, scale" data analytics tools is not empty; a working pilot already exists inside the same department. It simply is not named.
Verdict
Four stars, from three documented mistakes. The Ministry of Justice's new strategy is not dishonest about the two national fraud estimates it quotes; each one is real, and correctly page-referenced to a genuine source. What it does not do is reconcile the two when they disagree, represent its second source's own claim accurately, or use the one number that is actually about this department: £58.5 million in disclosed losses for 2024-25, including a fraud that ran for three years and took a decade to reach the accounts. A five-year plan to catch fraud sooner does not once mention the fraud its own auditor already found.
Sources
- MOJ Counter Fraud Strategy 2026 to 2030, Ministry of Justice, published 4 September 2026.
- MoJ Counter Fraud Strategy 2026 - 2030 (PDF), Ministry of Justice, published 4 September 2026.
- Public Sector Fraud Authority 2024/2025 Delivery Plan (PDF), Public Sector Fraud Authority, published 15 January 2025.
- An overview of the impact of fraud and error on public funds (PDF), National Audit Office, published November 2024, updated February 2025.
- Ministry of Justice Overview 2024-25 (PDF), National Audit Office, published December 2025.