Hannah von Dadelszen, Joint Head of Fraud at the Serious Fraud Office, said in a recent speech that the SFO ‘has made a very conscious strategic decision to invest a significant amount of resource in training our investigators’. She said:
We believe that counter-fraud investigation is a profession, and that there are specific skills and training required to be successful at it.
We have just commenced an ambitious comprehensive trainee investigator programme at the entry level grade. We have employed a dedicated training manager. You may be interested to know that we had 2000 applicants for that programme. We have appointed 12 successful candidates who started on January 3 this year. They will be provided with extensive coaching in our interview training, as well as tailored training on fraud, bribery and corruption, section 2 Criminal Justice Act powers, information handling, intelligence, banking analysis, witness statement drafting, searches, and personal safety, to name just a few. The trainees will spend about 18 months undertaking this training and will undertake rotations through the different divisions within the SFO. At the end of 18 months they will have collated a workbook of the work they have done, and they will sit an interview, All going well they will move up a grade. That means promotion in under two years. Now that it is brilliant opportunity for those trainees, and with that structure in place it is likely to significantly reduce the time they would otherwise spend at entry level. It also means we as an organisation have a plan for staffing our future.
It may also be of interest to you that the standards for that trainee investigator programme have been agreed with the cabinet office, and have been externally assessed and quality checked. We have also devoted considerable resource to training the internal assessors. All of this work underpins are commitment to development of a counter-fraud profession for investigators.
For her speech in full visit the SFO website.
