Benefit fraud? It adds up to much less than the money "saved" by people not getting benefits they are entitled, usually because of the difficulty of claiming them. It is also tiny compared to business fraud.
According to a new report by the Association of Certified Fraud Examiners, the typical organisation loses 5% of its annual revenue to fraud. More than $2.9 trillion is embezzled world-wide, each year - that's over $400 (nearly £300) for each child, woman, and man in the world.
And most of it is embezzled by bosses. "Frauds committed by owners/executives were more than three times as costly as frauds committed by managers, and more than nine times as costly as employee frauds. Executive-level frauds also took much longer to detect.".
Snooping software installed on company computers is annoying but useless in combatting fraud: it accounted for only 0.8% of fraud detections. Far and away the major way that frauds are detected is by workers blowing the whistle (40% of all fraud detections).
