Watchdog orders a rethink in time for the next emergency
This is according to a report from the National Audit Office , which found levels of fraud in UK public spending grew sharply during the pandemic. The fraud reported in accounts the watchdog audits rose from £5.5 billion in the two years before the pandemic to £21.0 billion in the two years after.
"Officials told us that they struggled to access the data that they needed that existed elsewhere in government to support emergency responses. The recent pandemic demonstrated that agreeing data sharing under the Digital Economy Act 2017 can be cumbersome and take too much time to be practical in an emergency," the report published this week said.
An NAO report from last year found that the government was only at an early stage of using intelligence, data-matching, and data analytics to prevent fraud and corruption.
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