Everyone's problem, nobody's job

The UK’s coordinated response to economic crime is constrained by structural problems that cannot be fixed by better working relationships alone, according to new research into the National Economic Crime Centre.

The study, from the University of Manchester and published in the Journal of Economic Criminology, is based on interviews with 22 senior officials drawn from the National Crime Agency, HM Revenue & Customs, the Serious Fraud Office, the Financial Conduct Authority, the City of London Police and private-sector partners. It is described by its authors as the most comprehensive examination to date of how the UK organises itself against fraud, money laundering, bribery and corruption.

The NECC was established in 2018 precisely to draw those bodies together. What the research finds is that bringing agencies into the same room does not resolve the question of who is accountable when something goes wrong. Responsibility for economic crime is shared across multiple organisations, and that sharing can leave leadership ambiguous. Partners arrive with different statutory duties, different performance regimes and different cultures, and their commitment to collective work sits outside their core mandates — which means it competes for resources with the things they are actually measured on.

Dr Diana Bociga, one of the authors, said the surprise was not that a multi-agency body faced difficulties, but that so many of them were tensions you have to manage on an ongoing basis rather than problems capable of conventional solution. That distinction matters for anyone reading the study as a to-do list. It isn’t one.

Definition problem

A recurring theme is the elasticity of the term “economic crime” itself. The category stretches from online romance fraud to sanctions evasion, offences that share almost nothing operationally and require entirely different responses. The researchers argue that the breadth of the label is politically useful — it attracts attention and funding — while obscuring the differences that determine how a case is actually worked.

It also makes prioritisation unstable. The study found that political priorities and world events can rapidly reshape which threats receive attention, leaving agencies chasing an expanding list of demands with fixed resources. For forces that have watched fraud demand grow while fraud capability remained concentrated in a small number of specialist units, that will read as familiar.

Measurement suffers for the same reason. Without agreed boundaries, there is no stable denominator, and success becomes difficult to demonstrate to the people holding the budget.

Participants were blunt about the tools available to them. Some reported that basic collaboration and data-analysis capability lags behind what the private sector takes for granted, and that information-gathering exercises which ought to take days can instead take months. The researchers link this directly to the ability to spot emerging threats and move intelligence between partners at operational speed.

This is the finding most likely to resonate with readers, because it is not specific to economic crime. The gap between the analytical capability held by banks and payment providers and that held by the agencies investigating what flows through them is a structural feature of the landscape, not a procurement failure by any single body.

Enabling conditions

The research sets out five enabling conditions: an agreed definition of economic crime, tight enough to guide prioritisation but flexible enough to serve both political and operational purposes; data-sharing and intelligence infrastructure that lets partners act and build understanding at the same time; incentives and dedicated funding that make commitment beyond core mandates viable; clearly delineated roles with recognised leadership; and accountability arrangements that secure participation without stripping partners of autonomy.

The last of those is the difficult one, and the authors do not pretend otherwise. Multi-agency bodies of this kind depend on voluntary contribution from organisations that answer elsewhere. Formalise the accountability too far and you have created another agency; leave it informal and participation depends on goodwill and personal relationships that do not survive a change of post-holder.

The authors note the findings have relevance well beyond the UK, as governments increasingly rely on partnership structures to address crime that crosses organisational and national boundaries. The same argument applies domestically, to every regional and national coordination body built on the same model.