The new director of the Serious Fraud Office is pushing to pay whistleblowers, a reversal from the agency’s past resistance to the tactic, as he tries to revive the fortunes of the beleaguered prosecutor. The move to reward informants for information is among Nick Ephgrave’s plans to reform how the SFO investigates major fraud and economic crime cases after years of setbacks and threats to its future.
In an interview with the Financial Times, Ephgrave said he would like the SFO to start using more investigative techniques borrowed from policing, such as covert intelligence, to help the agency move faster. “There are other ways to investigate that perhaps the SFO’s not used much in the past,” Ephgrave, 57, said in an interview at the agency’s headquarters near London’s Trafalgar Square. “Stuff we can borrow from policing — covert capabilities . . . thinking more in terms of crimes in action, how can we intercede now and actually catch the person in the act,” he added. “I’d like us to be quicker.” The measures are among a package of reforms Ephgrave is pushing for, along with a potential financial reward for whistleblowers, a common practice in US law enforcement but less prevalent in the UK. Last year, the US Securities and Exchange Commission awarded $279mn to a whistleblower, its largest ever payout. “We should pay whistleblowers,” Ephgrave said in a speech on Tuesday night at the Royal United Services Institute think-tank in Whitehall.
More than 700 UK whistleblowers have worked with US law enforcement since 2012, he added. Ephgrave’s remarks are a reversal of the thinking of previous SFO directors. David Green, who was head of the agency from 2012 to 2018, had argued moral responsibility should encourage people to come forward and said paying for such information “just isn’t British”. The UK Financial Conduct Authority also ruled payments out a decade ago, taking the view they would reward people for doing their regulatory duty. The UK government announced a review of whistleblower laws last year. The findings are due in March, according to a spokesperson for the UK Department for Business and Trade. Legislation would be required to allow the SFO to pay whistleblowers. Ephgrave’s comments come ahead of a visit to the US next week where he will seek to “cement relations” with his US law enforcement counterparts, he told the FT.
