Author: Peter Tickner
ISBN No: 978-1-4724-2121-0
Review date: 19/04/2024
No of pages: 300
Publisher: Gower
Publisher URL:
http://www.gowerpublishing.com/default.aspx?title_id=19957&edition_id=1209350232&page=641&calcTitle=1
Year of publication: 13/11/2015
Brief:
Fraud and Corruption in Public Services, Peter Tickner
price
£75 (£67.50 online)
Peter Tickner’s third book, about fraud in the public sector, is as wise and welcome for those in the field, and challenging to employers of counter-fraud specialists, as his first two, writes Mark Rowe.
Peter to recap headed internal audit at the Treasury and then the Met Police. He took early retirement in 2009, subject to a gagging order; and made the news during the Leveson Inquiry into the phone-hacking scandal when he was not allowed to give evidence over senior Met officers’ links with the press.
From the very start of Fraud and Corruption in Public Services – a foreword by Brian, now Lord Paddick, the former Met Police senior officer now a Liberal Democrat peer – the book is an insight into what drives someone to enter and stay in the lonely and responsible occupation of a counter-fraud person, besides the sort of cases that person might come across, and what the public sector can and ought to do about fraud and corruption. Paddick recalled how ‘such was Peter’s reputation at one point some of my police colleagues were regularly reporting on Peter’s activities … Sadly they were less concerned with fixing the shortcomings and problems that Peter had identified from his work around the Met and more concerned about how they could mitigate and minimise his impact.”
Given such an ambivalent employer, and after all one that is supposed to uphold the laws of the land, you have to be a strong character to do counter-fraud, and Peter tells us right away that fraud has always fascinated him. Just as some people – drunks and gluttons – can find pubs or chip shops anywhere, so some seemingly cannot help but sniff out fraud.
His first book, How to be a Successful Frauditor, was reviewed in our April 2011 issue. We last featured Peter in our July 2014 issue on the annual counter-fraud conference by the University of Portsmouth.
As in his earlier books, he sets out clearly why countering fraud matters (and clearly, those senior Met men – presumably men?! – took fraud and Peter seriously enough to go to those remarkable lengths). A fraud, if not handled well once brought to light – and as with any number of scandals, most famously Watergate, how an organisation reacts can become as damaging as the actual offence – can bring a bad press ‘and the whole organisations can enter a state of paralysis’.
Peter goes over the scale of the problem; how it compares with similar countries (and everywhere seems to have had its share of scandals); the law in the UK and similar places; what the UK public sector’s been doing about countering fraud, and cases and risks by sector – procurement (’the biggest risk’), shared services such as IT (where fraud is a ‘scourge’, Peter says), payroll and pensions. That’s for the practitioners.
For the more general reader, most interesting – and challenging – is the last part, on what to do. How hostile is the public sector to fraudsters – when you consider that ‘treatment of whistle-blowers on major failings within public services until relatively recent times has generally been harsh’. Peter makes the case – evidently those inside the Met disagreed – that public knowledge of fraud cases does good, as it discourages others who may be tempted. While the outlook for whistle-blowers seems rosier, the closure of the ‘short-lived’ National Fraud Authority in 2014 looked like a ‘backward step’, Peter says.
A significant end to the book goes over ‘corruption at the top’, including some cases of (unidentified) high-fliers brought down by fraud. He makes the important point that I’ve seldom seen expressed: “One consistent theme with people that behave badly is that they are usually indiscriminate about it. If there is an opportunity to behave badly, they will take it. The more opportunities, the more they take.” Frauds – theft from the employer – might even be for quite trivial sums, for taxi fares or meals. This matters not only as an insight into human nature – leopards don’t change their spots, as the saying goes – but in practice for the counter-fraud specialist. Because as Peter goes on to say, ‘any investigator worth their salt relies on little pointers that on their own may not be significant but when taken collectively together give cause for concern’. Peter details the investigation into the then Met Commissioner Sir Ian Blair over something as dry as IT procurement.
Peter winds up with what might seem another dry topic: corporate governance. Yet as he explains, processes – for open public procurement for instance – avoid fraud and show that business is done transparently. He takes us back to the Domesday Book as an example of checks on government – or rather those who were doing the administering. Peter runs his eye over recent developments such as the Single Fraud Investigation Service (an attempt to paper over the cracks in austere times?) and criticises ‘the fragmented approach to the definition of a counter fraud specialist’ as the City of London Police and some universities each offer training courses. And Peter notes also the proposed SIA-licensing of investigators, which however appears to have stalled.
If Peter has achieved anything besides a good read on a challenging subject for all those in public administration (how many at the Met are reading?!), he has set out the case for such a thing as a counter-fraud specialist in the public services, ‘concentrating on the needs of the public sector to protect the taxpayer’s purse’, which is not quite the same, as he points out, as treating fraud as a crime, a police matter. He closes by urging those in the field to get themselves appropriately qualified.
An important book by one of the few people – the campaign group Transparency International is another – that seeks to hold all to account, no matter how mighty. If you enjoy Peter Tickner’s writing, do try also books by Mike Comer, a fellow Gower author, such as his Bribery and Corruption: How to be an impeccable and profitable corporate citizen.
Fraud and Corruption in Public Services, by Peter Tickner. Hardback, 300 pages, ISBN: 978-1-4724-2121-0, published 2015 by Gower. Visit www.gowerpublishing.com (website price, £67.50).
