‘Someone Else's Money’: Learning from Economic Crime in the Public Sector
| Date | 01 February 1993 |
| Pages | 147-155 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb025616 |
| Published date | 01 February 1993 |
| Author | Alan Doig |
| Subject Matter | Accounting & finance |
'Someone Else's Money'1: Learning from
Economic Crime
in the
Public Sector
Alan Doig
Alan Doig
is Social Sciences Sub-Dean
at
the
University
of
Liverpool and Fellow
of its
Institute
of
Public Administration and
Management where
he is
the co-
organisor
of
the Unit
for
the Study
of
White Collar Crime. He has been
a
special adviser
to a
House
of
Commons
committee and
is
author
of
many
publications on fraud, corruption
and
conflict
of
interest, including 'Corruption
and Misconduct
in
Contemporary British
Politics', and
is
currently completing
the
first study
of
public sector fraud units.
ABSTRACT
The private sector
has
traditionally sub-
sumed
the
issue
of
fraud within
a
general
acceptance that there
are
certain costs
relating
to any
commercial activity
and,
even
if
they are expensive
to
deal
with,
pro-
vided they
do not
rise
at a
rate faster than
the rise
in
profits, they
are not
given
a
high
priority. However,
the
current slump
in
profits, a reaction
to
the politics
of
the 1980s,
and
an
increasingly competitive market-
place
are now
encouraging more attention
to be paid
to
costs.
In
the
public sector there
is no
perform-
ance indicator
of
profit. Much
of the
focus
has been
on the
cost
of the
delivery
of the
goods
and
services
and the
value
for
money that
it
represents. Public sector fraud
is therefore often
a
matter
for
media
or
par-
liamentary attention.
In considering
how
such awareness
develops, the problems
of
dealing with
long-
established evidence
of
fraud
and
corrup-
tion
and the
multi-faceted nature
of any
reform package, this paper considers
the
recent developments within
the
Property
Services Agency. This case study offers
a
salutary warning
of
the need
to
tackle fraud
and corruption earlier rather than later
and
also underlines
the
fact that, whether
the
fraud and corruption occurs
in a
public
or a
private sector organisation,
it is
manage-
ment's responsibility to deal with
it.
INTRODUCTION
'When you get a situation where large
sums of money are being dished out by
the state without proper controls', said a
Reading Council official in 1989 about
exploitation by landlords of the money
being spent on bed and breakfast accom-
modation for homeless families, 'no
matter how it's done the system is wide
open to abuse'.2 Reading is only one of
many local authorities and other public
sector organisations which have learnt
the need to develop effective means of
investigating the improper use of public
funds once evidence of that abuse has
been uncovered. They have also realised
147
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