Serious Fraud and
Anti-corruption Agency
National will back the Serious Fraud Office to
do more to stamp out corruption.
New Zealand’s most successful crime fighting
agency will get the resources it needs to
deliver on its stated role as the lead law
enforcement agency for investigating and
prosecuting serious financial crime, including
bribery and corruption.
National will more than double the Serious
Fraud Office’s budget, from its present total
budget for the 2020/21 financial year of $12.7
million to $25 million a year.
It doesn’t make sense for the lead agency
battling fraud, bribery and corruption, with
the greatest legal powers to uncover those
things, to be playing second fiddle to other
government agencies working in this area.
The SFO will continue to work alongside the
likes of the NZ Police’s Financial Intelligence
Unit and the Financial Markets Authority, but it
will have the funding in needs to do the job it
was quite rightly established in 1990 to do.
The Director of the SFO has statutory powers
that other New Zealand crime fighting
agencies do not, including powers to compel
the production of information and to require
witnesses and suspects to answer any
questions put to them without the right to
silence.
National doesn’t believe these powers are
being given enough opportunity to be used.
The SFO takes very few prosecutions, not
because there isn’t fraud, bribery and
corruption in New Zealand, but because the
office doesn’t have the resources to do its job
properly.
National is going to change that because we
take crime seriously.

National will:
• 

Double the budget of the Office from $12.7
to $25 million per year.

• 

Change the Office’s name to the Serious
Fraud and Anti-corruption Agency.

Providing the Serious Fraud
and Anti-corruption Agency
with more resources
The SFO might have a 100 per cent conviction
rate, but it doesn’t actually take many
prosecutions.
In the 2019/20 year the SFO had 36
defendants before the courts, with a total of
$161 million in alleged fraud value.
But that was in fact just seven cases – six with
guilty pleas, with only one needing a trial to
secure conviction.
And this was after the SFO had received 1138
complaints.
It’s not surprising some have suggested the
SFO is too conservative to lay charges in the
first place.
The SFO has been receiving paltry budget
increases at a time when the sort of crime
it fights is increasing, becoming more
sophisticated and is harder to trace.
This environment means greater cooperation
is required with the SFO’s international
partners alongside constant training to ensure
the agency has the best chance possible to
uncover crime and secure convictions.
This is a resource intense scenario which risks
seeing the SFO fall short of its goals – and
performance New Zealanders rightly expect of
it – if we don’t fund it properly.

1

 In an environment where the SFO’s Director
Julie Read says “changes to our national
demographics and in our international trade
partners also increase the risks of serious
financial crime being perpetrated in New
Zealand,” the number of investigations being
commenced and prosecutions taken is
actually dropping.

The overall Budget increase this year to the
SFO of $2.34 million to $12.7 million to meet
what the Budget describes as “increasingly
complex financial crime investigations and
facilitate organisational resilience,” doesn’t go
nearly far enough.

The SFO’s Vote Serious Fraud targets in the
Budget are modest and they’re not being met.

• 

Targets for the number of cases the SFO
has brought to prosecution have been
revised downward from Budget 2019/20
to 2020/21 from 10 – 12 to 8 – 10, with the
estimated number of actual cases brought to
prosecution for the 2019/20 year only 6 – 7.
There is a similar trend with the number of
Part 2 investigations commenced (where the
Director has reasonable grounds to believe
that an offence involving serious or complex
fraud may have been committed), with 14
– 16 budgeted for 2019/20, but only 10 – 14
budgeted for the 2020/21 year.
The SFO points out in its 2019 Annual Report
its “limited resources,” limits its focus to cases
that could significantly impact sections of the
economy or the New Zealand public.
In the case of bribery or corruption, that
means investigating crimes that could
undermine confidence in the public sector or
are of significant public interest.
National believes providing the SFO with the
resources needed to investigate all serious
fraud, bribery and corruption is in the public
interest.
We note that Vote Serious Fraud in the
May 2020 Budget said “The national AntiCorruption Work Programme will continue for
the next two years to 2021/22 at a cost of less
than $600,000 per annum.”
The suggestion that $600,000 a year is
an appropriate budget for a national
Anti-Corruption work programme for an
increasingly sophisticated and globally
connected country would be laughable if this
wasn’t so serious.

National will:
Double the budget of the Office from $12.7
to $25 million per year.

Serious Fraud and
Anti-corruption Agency
National will change the name of the Serious
Fraud Office to the Serious Fraud and Anticorruption Agency because we think New
Zealand needs to better understand the types
of crime fighting it is responsible for.
Over many years the SFO has developed a
reputation for targeting the private sector.
This is in part because of its early high profile
successes following the 1980s share market
boom and bust, and in part because of its
continued self-publicised focus on “white
collar crime.”
To many, the phrase white collar crime means
the big end of town, but that’s not the only
place the SFO does its work.
We want to make it clearly understood that
the office’s mandate and focus goes well
beyond the world of investment, accounting
and banking.
It tackles fraud, bribery and corruption in those
areas but also local government, community
entities and iwi trusts.
It tackles bribery and corruption in
infrastructure contracting, project tendering
and central government, including ministries,
Crown agencies and political parties.
In many ways lower-level, smaller value cases
of corruption in the regions have the greatest
impact on New Zealanders, by eroding small
communities’ trust in institutions they deserve

2

 to believe in, and depriving them of resources
they desperately need.

small number of proven cases of serious fraud,
bribery and corruption we uncover.

We think the name the Serious Fraud and
Anti-corruption Agency makes it much clearer
what the office’s business is, and why anyone
thinking about trying to circumvent the laws of
New Zealand should be aware that an agency
exists to stamp out that behaviour.

In a way it has the potential to become a selffulfilling prophecy; if you aren’t searching for
something you won’t find it.

National will:
• 

Change the Office’s name to the Serious
Fraud and Anti-corruption Agency.

Why is this policy important?

The SFO says the threats to our reputation as
a relatively corruption free country that is safe
to trade with and invest in “have probably
never been greater today than any other time
in our history.”
National agrees, and we’ll resource the office
properly to do the job New Zealanders expect
it to do.

Law enforcement agencies around the globe
are reporting a rise in the complexity of the
fraud and corruption cases they investigate,
as new technologies are increasingly used to
conduct crime.
The SFO has warned that New Zealand’s
relative isolation in geographic terms no
longer offers the protection it once did against
serious financial crime.
They have made it very clear the technologies
that allow us to communicate instantly, to talk
to friends, access bank accounts or buy goods
anywhere in the world, also facilitate fraud
and corruption.
That’s why the SFO has placed an increased
focus on leading in the sharing of financial
crime intelligence to identify and prevent
threats.
Internationally it does this working alongside
overseas law enforcement agencies and with
the Economic Crime Agencies Network (ECAN),
the International Anti-Corruption Coordination
Centre (IACCC) and the International Public
Sector Fraud Forum.
Corruption is a threat to the wellbeing of New
Zealand and to our fair way of doing business.
As a nation, we are regarded as one of the
least corrupt in the world.
But those rankings are based largely on
perceptions, in part because of the relatively
Authorised by G Hamilton, 41 Pipitea Street, Wellington.

3