The authorities should pay whistle-blowers, the Director of the Serious Fraud Office (SFO), Nick Ephgrave has said in his first public speech, having taken up the job in September. He was speaking at the Royal United Services Institute (RUSI), defence and security think-tank in London.
He said: “If you look at the example of the United States of America, their system allows that, and I think 86 per cent of the $2.2 billion in civil settlements and judgments recovered by the US Department of Justice were based on whistle-blower information. Since 2012, over 700 UK whistle-blowers have engaged US law enforcement. This is not just about the SFO. I would invite us to think about whether or not we want to consider incentivising whistle-blowers, it has many benefits.”
Also in his talk he set out the SFO’s work and ‘challenges’. As for the amounts of data, that may go back over decades, he said the SFO’s largest case, an active investigation, involved 48m documents, or 6.5 terabytes of data. “You can imagine what that kind of disclosure burden this presents for us, with the constant pressure of court timeframes, ongoing defence requests and the spectre of making a mistake hanging over us. One mistake, and all of a sudden, the ship will be dashed. We estimate that the cost of disclosure – just disclosure – gobbles up around 25pc of our operational budget.”
The SFO is trying something called “technology assisted review”, which is a form of machine learning to assist our disclosure obligations and try to provide a speedier review process. Ephgrave promised that under him the SFO will be bolder, more pragmatic, more proactive. “This means we won’t be afraid to shut down investigations, if it is increasingly apparent it is never going to reach the threshold for charge. We can redirect those resources to cases that have momentum, where there is a greater chance of us getting the person in front of a jury. That has got to be a good use of resources if you ask me. We have to be bold and make these decisions, that’s my message to you ….. This is a hard message to you, but we have to do it, otherwise we end up in decade-long investigations.”
He said he wants to be the first to prosecute someone under the new provisions of the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act. He described the SFO as ‘active partners’ in the Government’s ‘Stop! Think Fraud’ campaign that was launched last week, and he is sending staff to the National Economic Crime Centre (NECC), part of the National Crime Agency, ‘to look at how we can better engage with them, perhaps embed our people over there, as it’s really important that our experience and our insight informs the national strategic threat assessment, and that the SFO is writ large in the ambitious control strategy that are generated from that assessment.’
About Nick Ephgrave QPM
He served as Assistant Commissioner of the Metropolitan Police, and Chief Constable for Surrey Police. Most recently, he was Chair of the National Police Chiefs’ Council (NPCC) Criminal Justice Co-ordination Committee, and held roles on the Criminal Procedure Rules Committee and at the Sentencing Council.
About the SFO
Set up in 1988, the SFO is a specialist prosecuting authority tackling top level serious or complex fraud, bribery and corruption. The SFO only allows the claim by witnesses or whistle-blowers of ‘refundable expenses‘.
