ABSTRACT
Income fraud is often the hardest to evaluate, as it is easier to suppress records of sums received or fail to record them in the first place than to hide fraud or theft from monies spent, where there will be at the very least a trail of the money leaving the organisation to follow. Within the public sector both in the UK and across much of the rest of the World, the two largest areas of risk to the public purse of losses through fraud and corruption are from evasion of income tax and VAT or its equivalent. A major source of income for most local authorities is the rates levied on every householder and business in the local authority area. Cashless transactions have been the biggest single change in the arena of locally collected income for public bodies.
