Whilst the Shadow Chancellor Rachel Reeves may have good intentions with her proposed Covid Corruption Commissioner, if Labour win the next General Election, whose task she says will be investigating all manner of financial skulduggery during the pandemic, one has to spare a thought for the dedicated BBL “Door-Kicking” Police Department, if they are instructed to investigate every single case of suspected BBL fraud.
That already over-worked team of police officers known as NATIS or the National Investigation Service, have enough work to keep them busy for quite some time.
But they have been rounding up suspected fraudsters slowly but surely > https://mrbounceback.com/category/bbl-door-kicker-files/
However, let me present to you some facts and figures to put things into context to show what a mammoth task they face with any additional workload.
Not too long ago the National Audit Office completed a couple of investigations into the Bounce Back Loan scheme and they stated the following regarding NATIS :
“The Department uses enforcement agencies to investigate, prosecute and recover funds for large-scale fraud cases, but the agencies’ capacity is stretched.
The Department uses enforcement agencies, such as the National Investigation Service (NATIS), to investigate, prosecute, and recover funds for top-tier and the ‘higher end’ of mid-tier Bounce Back Loans. Given the potential fraud levels across all COVID-19 schemes, however, enforcement agencies are stretched.
NATIS, for example, received more than 2,100 intelligence reports by October 2021 but only had capacity to pursue a maximum of 50 cases per year.
The Department set NATIS a target of recovering at least £6 million of fraudulent loans from organised crime over three years, equal to the amount the Department has invested into NATIS.”
So currently, NATIS have the compacity to investigate 50 cases per year and looking at the very latest Bounce Back Loan performance figures, there are approximately some 54,407 cases of suspected BBL Fraud that Lenders have logged.
That therefore means, unless NATIS get a gargantuan increase in officers and a massive increase in funding, based on their current manning levels and workload, it will take them a mind-boggling 1,088+ years to investigate those 54,407 cases, at 50 cases per year.
Also, based on those National Audit Office figures, that state the cost of running NATIS is the same as the amount of money that team are expected to recover, one has to wonder is it really going to cost the taxpayer £1.650billion to just investigate £1.650billion worth of suspected BBL fraud cases, when many of those suspected cases of BBL fraud may turn out not to be fraud at all.
That £1.650billion figure is currently the value of suspected fraudulent BBLs Lenders have logged onto the British Business Bank portal which approximately equates to 54,407 actual Bounce Back Loans and is 3.54% of the total BBL drawn down value.
For an itemised breakdown of each BBL Lenders performance head on over to this section of the website > https://mrbounceback.com/category/league-of-shame/