IFED (Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department)

In 2012, the City of London Police, the UK's national lead force for fraud, opened the Insurance Fraud Enforcement Department, a unit of investigators whose running costs are paid by insurers. The set-up is unusual: fully warranted officers, with powers of arrest, search and detention, dedicated to a single category of offense and funded by the victims. The unit grew out of insurers' concern that police budget cuts would leave claims fraud complaints without follow-up. The unit takes its cases from companies and from the Insurance Fraud Bureau, investigates, then passes them to the Crown Prosecution Service under the Fraud Act 2006, whose offense of fraud by false representation carries up to ten years' imprisonment. It has worked on crash-for-cash rings, on ghost broking with prevention campaigns aimed at young drivers, and on fraud by professionals: garages, claims management firms, intermediaries. The question of independence keeps coming back. A unit paid for by the market picks its cases on policing criteria, and the funding buys neither a prosecution nor a conviction; that does not stop its priorities from matching those of the people paying. For the underwriter, the effect is measured less in convictions than in deterrence: an inflated claim is no longer exposed only to a declinature, it is also exposed to a dawn arrest. France has no equivalent, since insurance fraud there falls to the ordinary investigative services, acting on a complaint.