SFO promises a "strong, dynamic, confident and pragmatic organisation" in new five year strategy

The Serious Fraud Office ("SFO") published its new five year strategy (2024-29) (the "Strategy") on 18 April 2024, outlining its key objectives and focus areas. While the Strategy contains similar themes to the SFO's previous 2022-25 strategy, such as a continued focus on technology, there is a greater emphasis on innovation and the prevention of crime. In this briefing, we extract some of the key takeaways from the Strategy and the ways in which they may impact companies interfacing with the SFO in the future.

In the Strategy, Nick Ephgrave QPM, Director of the SFO, highlights the need for the agency to play a greater role in the national effort to tackle fraud by: (i) ensuring that cases progress faster, (ii) taking "bold and pragmatic" decisions on its casework, and (iii) being seen as the partner of choice domestically and internationally.

Fraud is now estimated to be the UK's most prevalent crime, and the Strategy recognises that the length of SFO investigations has increased, their complexity has grown, "and – at times – we have struggled to keep pace with demand". Key challenges such as the increasing pace of change and technological innovation have led the SFO to undertake a number of initiatives, including adopting this new strategy.

The Strategy is structured around four key outcomes, with several detailed outputs or actions sitting beneath each. In summary these are:

1. A highly specialised, engaged and skilled workforce

The SFO has identified resourcing as one of its key focus areas, as fewer people are choosing to enter or stay in criminal law enforcement. This, together with the increasing long-term demand in areas such as digital forensics, has led the SFO to focus on building its resilience and recruiting and developing high-calibre staff.

Over the next five years, the SFO will enhance its workforce by providing additional support to staff by developing its benefits package, strengthening learning and development, building on equity, diversity and inclusion, and upgrading its HR support by rolling out a new enterprise resource planning application.

2. Harnessing the technology and tools of a changing world

Rapid technological advancements have enabled criminals to exploit new and powerful tools, from crypto assets to AI-generated audio or visuals that can circumvent current fraud defences. The Strategy notes that, while technology may pose as a challenge to the SFO, it also presents significant opportunities.

Accordingly, the SFO will strengthen its ability to monitor and forecast developments in technology, trial new and innovative tools, and focus resource on developing its use of machine-learning AI to make it easier to review evidence, contact witnesses and support victims. Further, the SFO will adopt a new case management system to streamline its casework. By anticipating changing needs and updating its technology roadmap, the SFO aims to stay ahead of the curve and unravel the complexity of financial crime.

3. Combatting crime effectively through intelligence, enforcement and prevention

The SFO states that it will deepen its intelligence and make effective use of the covert powers available to it. Through a pilot programme, the SFO will test new prevention methods to "cut fraud, bribery and corruption off at the source". However, it is not currently clear what this pilot programme will entail.

The focus on combatting crime "effectively" also comprises a goal of driving efficiency in SFO cases, with the Strategy recognising that some SFO cases can – and should – progress faster. This echoes Mr Ephgrave's comments from his speech at the Royal United Services Institute in February (the "RUSI Speech") in which he emphasised the need for the SFO to progress cases quickly. Again, the Strategy does not contain any detail on how this efficiency will be achieved, other than noting that the SFO will adapt its end-to-end casework processes.

Building upon the RUSI Speech, in which Mr Ephgrave also suggested that whistleblowers should be paid, the SFO has now indicated that it intends to explore the incentivisation of whistleblowers further. This would mark a significant departure from the UK's current whistleblowing regime, and lead to greater similarity with the system in the United States.

The SFO has also indicated that it will maximise the use of tools that it already has, such as helping corporates to self-report more easily, and working with other law enforcement agencies on covert capabilities. In terms of other tools at its disposal, the Strategy states that the SFO needs to be more open and innovative in pursuing alternatives to formal prosecution and, where appropriate, building on its use of Deferred Prosecution Agreements. Notably, the SFO has also highlighted that it intends to push for amendments to the existing disclosure regime, including in connection with the ongoing Fisher Review.

4. Becoming a proactive, authoritative player in the global and domestic justice system

Due to the global threat of financial crime, the Strategy states that the SFO will be focussing on collaborating with partners both in the UK and globally and taking advantage of new ways to share and exchange information and intelligence. To carry this out effectively, the SFO intends to build on its role within the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development working group on bribery, while also supporting the upcoming inspection of the UK by the Financial Action Taskforce.

The SFO will bolster global defences against fraud, bribery and corruption by formalising its specialist training and strengthening its operations through the deployment of new powers, including the new "failure to prevent fraud" offence (see our briefing on this offence here and all episodes from our "The Fraud Files podcast series", and some accompanying briefings on various aspects of the Act here). The SFO also states that it will develop a comprehensive secondment programme that will share skills and missions.

This focus on both global and domestic criminality serves as a reminder that the SFO will continue to focus on international issues, even though many of its recent investigations have had a more domestic focus.

Performance against the Strategy will be tracked against justice reforms, operational delivery, organisational strength and resilience, and finance. A detailed review of the Strategy will be carried out in 2026/27

These four strategy outcomes all contain themes that the SFO has spoken of before and, on one view, the Strategy does not provide any significant new insight into either the challenges that the SFO faces or its approach to them. Companies should nonetheless continue to monitor the implementation of the Strategy and other SFO initiatives as it works to realise its ambitions to become more innovative, collaborative and proactive. In looking at its compliance procedures and programmes, and in the event that fraud or corruption issues arise internally, a company's understanding of the SFO's position and approach may prove critical when considering how such issues should be addressed.

Finally, it is noteworthy that a March 2024 press release flagged that Nick Ephgrave has initiated five new investigations since taking on the Directorship role in September 2023. This is a significant number, although it remains to be seen how these investigations progress and whether this rate of opening new investigations will continue.