This is from this morning's FT headlines email:
Alleged fraud, convicted fraud and suspected fraud.
Business as normal in the world of finance then.
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You missed out the NAO report on the HMRC whose less than stellar perfomance in tax review cases will probably just mean that rather a lot of fraud goes undected and unchallenged.
I always find it rather interesting in fraud cases as to how all the press attention is on the perpetrators rather than those who should should have been exercising the controls to prevent and/or detect the fraud at a much earlier stage.
You may be interested to know that HP, which is facing an $8.8bn writedown on its assets following the disastrous takeover of UK ‘Silicon Fen’ company Autonomy, is the main IT supplier for HM Government (I had the dubious pleasure of dealing with EDS, another company acquired by HP in 2008, when working on the New Deal for Lone Parents programme). HPs $8.8bn writedown is equivalent to more than 3 times the £1.5bn it gets from UK taxpayers. It’s also remarkably shy about its tax payments. It shows lower margins in the UK than earned worldwide by HP which employs a variety of offshore ‘techniques’, outlined in a US Senate report in September. The UK accounts show that at the end of 2011 it stood to pay £20m in corporation tax (or 1.3% of £1.5billion) while at the same point the previous year it was expecting a £13.5m repayment (0.89% of £1.5billion). Excellent vfm. Not…
Yes I was struck by the FT this last day or so yesterday for example ‘the biggest banking UK fraud’ page opposite another whole page on the latest of the hacking scandal which the FT counted as 94 arrests to date. I wonder yet again if the BBC is covering all these issues sufficiently, clearly and with its remit to inform. I say this again because I continue to find PM at 5PM a programme which hardly covers business, economics or finance in terms of news. We continue to live through the most serious banking crises, the most serious economic debt crises ever and day after day the BBC outputs remain generally bogged down & unable to tell it as it is. The FT is recognised more and more for its hard-edged coverage of what matters.