Companies supplying NHS could cost £1bn a year in fraud

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The former head of fraud detection in the NHS, Jim Gee, has said the healthcare system could be losing as much as £1bn a year from fraud while procuring services, often from private companies.

He said, the health service was missing out on huge potential savings by cutting the budget for research and investigations into the problem.

Mr Gee’s report, was conducted for the accountant PKF and the University of Portsmouth Centre for Counter-fraud Studies, and cited two Rochdale NHS managers who were jailed for setting up a sham IT companies through a network of offshore firms which would then overcharge the health service for products.