Data sharing for counter fraud activities: Summary of a private roundtable

The response to the coronavirus pandemic brought data to the heart of government decision making like never before – but what lessons does government need to learn about data sharing from the experience?

This paper summarises a roundtable discussion that brought together academics, public servants and private organisations, such as high street banks, involved in a range of data sharing initiatives to identify and prevent fraud. It found that:

• Data sharing for counter fraud activity is especially challenging due to requiring commercially sensitive personal and identifiable data that is held in different secure environments. The creation of new data sharing agreements for this data take time – which was often unavailable during the pandemic response.
• There are numerous ongoing counter fraud data sharing activities, reliant on government and private sector collaboration. This has often relied on the goodwill of participating organisations, but full sectoral participation would make future schemes more effective.
• Establishing a strategic data sharing framework, with pre-agreed standards on data format and security in accordance with regulatory and safeguarding standards would improve the emergency response of government, by making establishing new data sharing agreements for novel purposes quicker.

This is the third of six roundtable write ups in the series, each based on a roundtable discussion around a particular case study or theme. The remaining write ups will be published in January 2023, with a short report drawing together key themes and lessons to follow in February 2023.

We would like to thank Scott Logic for supporting this project. Read more from Scott Logic about the Data Sharing in Government research project on their website.