launched last year<\/a>.<\/p>\nIt conducted a six-month pilot programme to build a clearer, “system-wide” picture of corruption and fraud risks across the public sector.<\/p>\n
The SFO announced the findings from the taskforce on Tuesday, which had assessed the fraud and corruption controls of six public agencies, gathered data on corruption-related activity and identified potential cases for investigation.<\/p>\n
The agencies included the Department of Corrections, Inland Revenue, and the Ministry of Social Development<\/p>\n
The anonymised findings showed that cases of internal fraud and corruption were likely under-reported due to “inadequate prevention and detection controls, and gaps in reporting.”<\/p>\n
Other findings included that some agencies had “strong controls in place”, while others were not “appropriately prepared to prevent or detect wrongdoing”.<\/p>\n
It said gaps in the system “may be leaving the sector vulnerable”, with agencies feeling they “lack sufficient guidance on thresholds for passing fraud and corruption cases to law enforcement.”<\/p>\n
The pilot identified 446 cases of alleged or suspected internal fraud or corruption from the data supplied, which covered a period of 15 months.<\/p>\n
But it noted those figures likely represented only a fraction of actual activity.<\/p>\n
“Inconsistent definitions, and fragmented recording and referral processes mean the true scale of internal fraud and corruption remains unclear.”<\/p>\n
In comparable jurisdictions it showed that between 0.45 and 5.6 percent of public funds are lost to fraud, corruption, and error each year – applied to 2025 Budget expenditure, the report found that represented an estimated $823 million to $10.24 billion in potential losses.<\/p>\n
Sign up for Ng\u0101 Pitopito K\u014drero<\/a>, a daily newsletter curated by our editors and delivered straight to your inbox every weekday.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Photo: Pixabay\/shafin_protic Cases of internal fraud and corruption are almost certainly being under-reported, according to a new report…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":140080,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[48,47,111,43,139,69,49,46,44,45],"class_list":{"0":"post-276553","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-new-zealand","8":"tag-audio","9":"tag-current-affairs","10":"tag-new-zealand","11":"tag-news","12":"tag-newzealand","13":"tag-nz","14":"tag-podcasts","15":"tag-public-radio","16":"tag-radio-new-zealand","17":"tag-rnz"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276553","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=276553"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/276553\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/140080"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=276553"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=276553"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=276553"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}