No one could accuse the Serious
Fraud Office of living a charmed life. It is regularly
accused of stupidity and inefficiency by a hostile press, and not
infrequently the government weighs in with destabilising tactics,
either by slashing its paltry budget, or by planning to redesign
the counter fraud landscape.
A report this week in the Financial Times
suggested that the Home Secretary is revisiting plans to dismantle
the SFO, either by rolling it into the National Crime Agency,
or by some other merger of fraud investigators. These plans
first surfaced in about 2010, at a time when proposals for the NCA
were being fleshed out. The NCA, which took over from the
Serious Organised Crime Agency last year, has a division devoted to
economic crime – the Economic Crime Command. In its current
form the ECC has more of a coordinating and prioritising function
than an investigating capacity. For example, it scans the
fraud horizon, assesses which type of fraudulent
