Potential fraud applications to the Cultural Recovery Fund 2025
This MoU for supporting the identifying of potential fraudulent company applications to the Cultural Recovery Fund was agreed and put in place in 2025.
Documents
Details
This agreement is published as part of the Code of Practice for public authorities disclosing information under chapters 1, 3 and 4 (Public Service Delivery, Debt and Fraud) of part 5 of the Digital Economy Act 2017.
The purpose of this data share is for HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) to help the Department for Culture, Media & Sport (DCMS) detect fraud against organisations and businesses who have submitted applications for a grant during the COVID-19 pandemic.
The Culture Recovery Fund (CRF) awarded grants to organisations based on a number of criteria, such as cultural significance, however in most cases turnover of the applicant organisation was an important variable and one of the key determinant factors in the size of the award. The data share will seek to identify those organisations and businesses who applied for a CRF grant and had declared falsified earnings in order to receive more money with the potential outcome of repayment of grant and possible criminal charges. If fraud is suspected, then DCMS will seek to refer the case to Arts Council England (ACE) for their further investigation. This may then lead to ACE requesting a copy of the company tax return from the applicant and should this show no legitimate explanation for the discrepancy then they would issue a request for repayment of the funds and consider law enforcement involvement as appropriate.
Benefits of this data share are as follows:
- identification of fraud which can then be investigated and recovered
- identification of control gaps in ongoing and future grant schemes
- serves as a statistically valid fraud measurement exercise for the purpose of assessing overstatement of need/turnover fraud allowing DCMS to inform risk appetite and wider corporate governance
- if successful may allow for future HMRC data sharing to mitigate future risks of fraud
- demonstrates government commitment to investigating potential abuse of COVID-19 support schemes of which there is a significant public interest
There are no direct benefits to HMRC other than to support DCMS in their aim of identifying fraudulent company applications to the Cultural Recovery Fund.