The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) is promoting this year’s International Fraud Awareness Week as part of its expanded focus on preventing fraud in New Zealand.
The awareness week runs from 14-20 November and helps to champion and support the global fight against fraud to prevent the theft of funds from the public and private sectors.
SFO Director, Julie Read, says, “Estimates suggest that organisations globally could be losing as much as 5% of their annual revenue to fraud and corruption. It's therefore in everyone's best interests to find and report fraud, to ensure that funds allocated to business and government activities and programmes are achieving their intended goal.”
In the 2020/21 financial year alone, the SFO had 45 defendants before the courts, including appeals, with a total of $292 million in alleged fraud.
Recently, the SFO’s remit was expanded to include the prevention of financial crime, to complement the work it does investigating and prosecuting fraud and corruption.
The additional funding enabled the SFO to establish a Strategy and Prevention team dedicated to preventing financial crime and launch a Counter Fraud Centre - Tauārai Hara Tāware.
Ms Read says “The Prevention team's initial focus has been on supporting the public sector. Fraud involving public funds represents a loss of money and lost opportunities to positively support vital areas of government work such as health and infrastructure. It also undermines confidence in public institutions.”
While New Zealand was ranked first, equal with Denmark, in the 2020 Transparency International Corruption Perception Index, Ms Read says there is no room for complacency.
“Our reputation for low levels of corruption brings considerable benefits and is something we should all be vigilant about protecting,” she says.
Public sector organisations are encouraged to visit https://sfo.govt.nz/prevention/ and sign up to the SFO’s Fraud Prevention Portal.
The SFO is interested in receiving any information that may assist in the detection of serious or complex fraud, bribery or corruption. See https://sfo.govt.nz/contact/report-a-fraud/ for more information.
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