Introduction

As the landscape of economic crime continues to evolve rapidly, those at the forefront of counter-fraud and corruption efforts face increasing pressure and complexity. This update is intended for leaders working in counter-fraud, economic crime, and corruption – particularly those in the public sector.

You share a vital mission: to combat financial crime, protect public services, and ultimately support vulnerable citizens who depend on essential infrastructure and services.

The recent Spending Review 2025 underscores the importance of demonstrating the value of your work. It highlights how your efforts must align with the highest risk and harm areas, and how targeted investment can enable transformative improvements in your response.

The scope of this transformation will depend on your current capabilities and financial resources. However, leveraging data and technology will be essential for improving efficiency and achieving your organisation’s mission.

Many of you may already be exploring or piloting AI and other advanced tools to enhance fraud prevention, strengthen intelligence and risk insights, and increase detection rates in key areas over time.

Measuring impact and outcomes effectively is crucial – not only to sustain current resources but also to build a compelling case for future investments in tools, technologies, and personnel critical to your mission.

This update provides an overview of the current operating environment, which you may find useful for position papers, business cases, and initiating conversations about the need for transformation. It also outlines best practices for measuring impact, emphasising its role in securing ongoing and future support.

The scale of the challenge

• £219bn sector wider loss
• £59bn public sector loss
• 50% of all recorded crime in UK Fraud & Cyber
• 70% fraud has international element
• 86% fraud unreported

Across the public sector, teams will be operating in a variety of different contexts. For those focused on tackling fraud and economic crime, the scale of the challenge is huge.  Academics and industry lead estimate sector wide losses to exceed £200bn annually, and the Public Sector Fraud Authority estimates loss in the public sector alone is in the region of £59bn. They also estimate that for unexamined spend, 0.5-5% may be lost to fraud and error.

Increasingly we are seeing the convergence of crime types, with criminals using fraud to fund wider criminality, on a global scale. This is powered using digital currencies such as crypto, to move and layer funds beyond the reach of law enforcement in money laundering activity, and fraud activity linked to organised criminality.

The operating context for those leading financial crime and counter fraud responses, remains a hostile one, and increasingly complex, with sanctions another area to manage and be cognisant of when planning where to target resources and protect assets and infrastructure. Sanctions circumvention, and the linking of sanctioned individuals to organised crime, remains a constant and high priority threat.

The fraud ‘iceberg’

Fraud is now the most prevalent crime in the UK, if not the world. UK statistics show, coupled with cyber, it now accounts for 50% of all recorded crime.  We are seeing in national threat reports the continued trend for criminals to adopt AI and the use of deep fake technology, to facilitate frauds including phishing, against the public, industry and government agencies.

To add to the challenges faced, the National Crime Agency (NCA) believes due to their threat insight monitoring, that this is a likely under reporting and there is more to be found, with 86% of fraud going unreported.

This echoes the long-held views of the Public Sector Fraud Authority (PSFA), who often use the ‘iceberg’ to illustrate how much fraud and error remains undetected. That brings us on to consider the nature of fraud, and indeed corruption that my occur. It’s hidden by nature; perpetrators work hard to appear compliant, conforming to the processes and rules we set out. Therefore, it is key that investment is secured to provide our workforces with the right tools and technologies to root it out- preferably in real time, in a way that allows action to be taken to prevent and reduce widespread and ongoing harm from occurring.

With many fraud and economic cases now having an international element to them (City of London police estimate 70% of all cases), it is not reasonable to investigate our way out of the threat we are facing. It is critical to ensure we adopt a fraud and criminal management response that is focused first and foremost on understanding our risks, prioritising those that will lead to highest harm, and concentrating on using this insight to support our department/agency to prevent where possible.

A futureproofed response

How do we futureproof our operational response? The key question for public sector leaders is how do we futureproof our operational response, focus on prevent through use of data and then continually monitor our performance and push using this for more investment to continually enhance the capability of our people and tools available for them – including AI? The answer is being confident in your mission, performance, and outcomes – demonstrating clearly the value add you bring to your organisation, but also to the wider government aims.

In this next SR period, Government will remain a target for criminals including those operating overseas, we cannot mitigate every risk, but we can take the opportunities available to work collaboratively, across sectors as is the focus of the pending Home Office Fraud Strategy; and harness technology where possible to enable us to be most efficient and successful operationally.

Technology can support in end-to-end fraud and crime management – from the evaluation of risk, the collection and coordination of intelligence, all the way through to case building and post investigative analysis.

Increasingly technology can also be used to detect future threats, identifying patterns system wide and helping us to better understand and target our resources. The better the public sector detects fraud and wider harm, the better it can both find and recover losses, and build stronger controls to prevent such losses in the future.

Measuring impact and outcomes

So, how do we measure impact and demonstrate success?

Setting metrics to demonstrate and measure impact is challenging, whether you are a new or more mature function. The first hurdle is to reflect on what constitutes a measure of success that is meaningful to your context and aligns with your overall organisational aims.

Where to start:

• Benchmark against others in your organisation, internationally, and across sectors. This is the best way to understand your current performance and identify any gaps. If you have a more mature organisation or are established in your activities, you may be able to approach this same task by using your historical performance data for comparison.
• Use your operational insights to evaluate intelligence and investigation outcomes. This can be an excellent way to assess your success rate, value for money, ROI, and identify problem areas where a change in process or a technological enhancement may help improve performance.
• Evaluate and develop risk insight. Having a detailed understanding of your risks will help you determine if you are making an impact in the right areas (i.e., areas of highest risk). As this evolves, you can demonstrate success by responding to those highest-risk areas and identifying controls or system changes. By doing so, you can further demonstrate improvement and impact to the wider business.  You can also triangulate the response to harm (investigations or sanctions) with the highest-harm areas to better articulate impact.

Perception and cultural changes in an organisation can also be a helpful barometer. Consider a survey of staff, stakeholders, and suppliers – this analysis can be helpful in demonstrating the culture of the organisation, its reputational standing, and the impact of counter-fraud, corruption, and economic crime activity.

Monitoring the changes over time, linked to specific periods of activity or campaigns, can bring added value and insight to your overall ‘impact’ story.

Key areas to measure impact

Measuring impact is key to:

• Demonstrate accountability
• Demonstrate ROI
• Understand and articulate the scale of the problem
• Build public, executive and ministerial confidence in delivery
• Secure resources, and support case for future investment

Measure detected, prevented and recovered loss

These can be quantified using financial metrics, and actual losses aligned to service, benefit or grant values. These can be measured quarterly and then grouped into your annual report filings.

As you develop your capability, you can optimise this reporting by aligning it to your key risk areas, using your fraud risk assessment insights. This will highlight where you have taken action and its led to prevention (control changes), where you have increased reporting channels (and detection has increased) or where you have partnered with third parties or invoked civil recovery options alongside criminal- to maximise recovery.

It is important to also consider the power of disruption activity – this may be targeted to particular threats and or enablers, be intelligence led and timed in terms of delivery. The quantification of behavioural impact and threat reduction as a result of this activity is a key metric to sit alongside traditional detect, prevent and recovery of loss.

Estimating loss

Depending on the maturity and level of known loss in your organisation it maybe helpful to incorporate estimates into your matrix of outcomes. Estimates are helpful where you have low reporting levels, low detection of fraud and error or gaps in your counter fraud monitoring.  Data and Analytics can prove helpful to scan your transactions and spend areas to seek out anomalies, coupled with thematic or sampling, this can bring to the fore interesting insights into estimated levels of loss in specific areas.

This insight can be used to inform control changes and recommendations across your business.

Demonstrating  ROI

Increasingly it is important to articulate the cost of counter fraud activity or financial crime monitoring, versus the outcomes achieved. Both actual metrics (detect, prevent, recover) and estimates play a role in helping you do so successfully. This is a strong tool to deploy to build on future business cases, and for example show how the introduction of technology and or more resources could improve your annual ROI.

There are examples of good practice readily available via open sources such as the NAO, DWP, DHSC, NHS and HMRC to help.

How Clue can help

Clue works with many stakeholders across sectors and across jurisdictions. All of these stakeholders have in common with Clue, their mission and purpose to protect society and reduce harm; whether they operate in fighting fraud in central government, safeguarding children and adults in sport and local government, tackling insider threats and preventing corruption at an international level.

• Benchmark your performance against other leaders in the Clue community
• Receive expert guidance on optimising operational efficiency and workflow management
• Enhance your monitoring, reporting, and assurance capabilities for improved oversight
• Discover strategies to reduce the costs associated with fraud, corruption, and crime prevention
• Gain deeper insights into your impact with improved management information
• Strengthen outcomes by integrating intelligence across your organisation and beyond • Better assess risks through investigation outcomes and advanced risk-monitoring tools
• Leverage Clue insights to build a compelling case for future investments.

Collaborating with leading experts across diverse fields gives us unique insights into how they develop best practices, innovate processes and techniques, and build long-term capabilities to detect, prevent, and reduce harm effectively.

Our ambition for Clue is to empower users to efficiently prioritise, organise, and act on complex information – leveraging AI to automate data triage, entity recognition, link suggestion, and insight generation, all while upholding responsible, transparent, and ethical standards.

With over 40 years of proven experience supporting leaders in counter-fraud, crime, corruption, and safeguarding, we offer personalised consultations to help you shape your requirements, explore the art of the possible, and plan effectively for your 2025 business strategy.

To learn more or to discuss your approach to economic crime, book a consultation with our Head of Economic Crime, Laura Eshelby.