UK authorities tasked with preventing fraud "seem not to care" about the people caught up by the fraud, MPs have been told.
At a summit held by the all-party parliamentary group on investment fraud and fairer financial services yesterday (October 31) in Portcullis House, Margaret Snowdon OBE was scathing about the lack of joined-up thinking between various UK authorities and a lack of co-ordination in pursuing the criminals.
Snowdon, who is chairperson of of the Pensions Advice Taskforce and an adviser to the APPG, said: "There is a significant failure in oversight by authorities. Scammers get away with it; victims don't."
She touched on various examples, such as pension liberation schemes, including the many overseas pension schemes that had been allowed to be set up and registered by HM Revenue & Customs.
Back in 2013, FT Adviser had been highlighting issues with overseas companies registering pension schemes in the UK and overseas advisers 'passporting' into the UK, prompting HMRC to change its rules for registration.
But according to Snowdon, it has been the people who were duped into transferring into such scam arrangements that have faced financial penalties - and they are still waiting for redress from the relevant agencies.
Snowdon also commented: "It seems authorities do not differentiate between victims and tax cheats. They seem not to care. So we must change the laws."
Highlighting her latest petition, a Call For Fair Tax Treatment for Pension and Investment Fraud Victims (you can find a link to this at the bottom of the story), Snowdon added: "People want to see change. We need to pursue criminals. We need to advocate for justice."
But her comments came amid a chorus of voices from criminologists, anti-fraud campaigners, MPs, lawyers and enforcement agents, who spoke of the sheer cost of combating fraud - and the fact "so many agencies therefore refuse to take it on".
Cost of combat
Part of the problem, according to Bob Blackman, MP for Harrow East, is that this is perpetrated from outside of the UK, and none of the enforcement agencies or regulators involved at various stages in the fraud chain, seem to act in concert and co-operation with each other.
He commented: "More than 40 per cent of all crime in the UK relates to financial crime and fraud, yet less than 2 per cent of police resource is going towards tackling it."
Anthony Stansfeld, a former Conservative Party politician and the first Thames Valley Police and Crime Commissioner, claimed that, in his years of tackling fraud, he has found the "cover ups to be extraordinary".
And even where the fraud comes about as a result of bad actors in UK institutions, as highlighted by scandals such as the business loans banking scams, as FT Adviser reported in 2017, it is difficult to get all the various agencies to work together to tackle the root cause.
