PARLIAMENTARY WRITTEN QUESTION
Fraud: Wales (29 October 2014)

The Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) maintains a central record of the numbers of defendants and the outcome of prosecution proceedings, divided into twelve Principal Offence Categories, including ‘Fraud and Forgery’.

The category of ‘Fraud and Forgery, includes offences prosecuted by way of the Fraud Act 2006, fraudulently evading income tax, VAT, excise duty or national insurance, bankruptcy offences, money laundering, forgery or using a false instrument and obtaining property, services or pecuniary advantage by deception.

The table below shows, in each of the last five calendar years, the number of defendants prosecuted and finalised, in Crown Courts in Wales, where the Principal Offence was categorised as ‘Fraud and Forgery’.

Data Source: CPS Management Information System

The Principal Offence Category is assigned at the end of a prosecution to indicate the most serious offence with which a defendant is charged at the time of finalisation. It is not possible to disaggregate the outcomes of individual offences, such as fraud, without undertaking a manual search of case records which would incur disproportionate cost.

This table does not include those cases prosecuted by the DWP prosecution teams that merged with the CPS in 2012, as the DWP Cardiff team prosecutes cases in Crown Courts in England, as well as Wales. It is not possible to provide a breakdown of cases prosecuted solely in Wales without incurring a disproportionate cost.