Police staff set to help fraud office tackle backlog

Adam Feeley, head of the Serious Fraud Office. Photo / Dean Purcell

The Serious Fraud Office has asked police bosses to lend experienced detectives to the white-collar-crime agency to help investigate big cases - with the police to pick up the bill.

Howard Broad, when he was still Police Commissioner, agreed that up to 10 officers, to the rank of detective sergeant, would be seconded to the SFO for 12 months.

Applications closed last week. The police will continue to pay the salaries of the successful candidates.

Headquarters spokesman Jon Neilson said the SFO last year asked for experienced investigators to support it in big inquiries.

"This was the most pragmatic approach and also gives police staff experience in corporate and serious fraud investigations."

Privately, some police sources have expressed concerns about staff resources being stretched to help another government department.

SFO director Adam Feeley said up to six police secondments had been agreed with Mr Broad before he was replaced as commissioner by Peter Marshall.

"We now have one person on secondment from the police and some additional secondments are planned in the coming months.

"It will provide the police secondees with an excellent opportunity to work in a specialised area of law enforcement; it will obviously assist SFO with what is a fairly solid workload."

Mr Feeley said the arrangement would allow the organisations to work together more closely and ensure that "we are maximising the effectiveness and efficiency of the law enforcement budget".

The SFO annual budget increased from $5 million to $7.4 million last year. Hundreds of thousands of dollars have been spent using private investigators and forensic accountancy firms, such as Deloitte, to cope with a large workload.

But the police secondment comes as the fraud agency advertises for a number of senior investigators, lawyers and forensic accountants one year after the biggest shakeup in SFO history.

Five staff with a combined 70 years' experience left under a restructuring by Mr Feeley, including assistant director Gib Beattie, senior investigator Ian Varley and top forensic accountant David Osborn.

Mr Varley is a former senior detective who kept strong ties with the Auckland police fraud squad while he was at the SFO.

The trio now run a private forensic investigation firm, Beattie Varley and Associates.

Mr Beattie said former SFO director David Bradshaw previously started a secondment scheme where officers could be involved in complex financial crime investigations and take those skills back to the police. The arrangement was canned because of budget constraints.

But Mr Beattie said it was naive to think police staff could "hit the ground running" in complex fraud investigations such as finance company inquiries.

"Serious and complex financial crime is a specialised form of crime and anyone who tells you differently is sadly mistaken.

"Nor is it something that you can productively throw large numbers of staff at, because if you do that, then you run the very real risk of a disjointed and ineffective investigation.

"If the SFO is struggling to investigate its now very public caseload then perhaps it needs to look at its management of those cases, rather than thinking a solution is to swamp them with people."

The SFO faced abolition between September 2007 and October 2008 until the election of the National-led Government.

The Labour Government it took over from had wanted to merge the SFO with the new police Organised and Financial Crime Agency, which National opposed at the time.