UK civil servant gets away with juggling five jobs
Kashim Chowdhury, 56, was found guilty of fraud after secretly holding five full-time public sector jobs simultaneously and pocketing over £284,000.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
- Kashim Chowdhury, 56, was found guilty of nine counts of fraud.
- He fraudulently earned over £284,000 from overlapping government jobs.
- The UK Civil Service human resources system lacked a centralised database.
- He worked from home and used sick notes to cover his schedule.
The astonishing case came to light when Aleesha Adams, a line manager at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), joined a video call with Kashim Chowdhury in May 2023. He had been on sick leave for nearly three months, and Adams wanted to establish a return-to-work plan. During the call, Chowdhury coughed, waved tissues, and appeared unusually pale, which initially signalled severe illness to her.
However, Adams soon noticed white powder separating from his forehead, sweating through darker skin underneath and around his neck. She testified at his trial that he appeared to be wearing white make-up to fake being ill, a claim Chowdhury denied in court. Unbeknownst to her, UKHSA was only one of multiple employers on his payroll at the time.
Stock photo for illustration only, not from the actual event
That very month, Chowdhury was also being paid to work full-time for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency, and the Home Office. His contracts totaled 183 hours a week, surpassing the total hours available in a seven-day week, allowing him to fraudulently collect over £284,000 of taxpayers' money.
This case highlights critical structural vulnerabilities within the UK Civil Service, which employs over 550,000 people. Because individual government departments operate independent hiring processes without a unified human resources network, applicants could easily conceal existing government employment. Combined with remote work arrangements and psychiatric sick notes, this lack of cross-departmental oversight enabled widespread undetected fraud.
Chowdhury maintained eight overlapping full-time public-sector roles between 2020 and 2023, earning a total of £350,000. Suspicion arose when Adams discovered he logged into a meeting using a Defra email address, which he dismissed as a technical glitch. She escalated her concerns, yet his fraud persisted until he voluntarily left the Civil Service in September 2023.
"effectively tell him what to do the whole time"
Dan McCartney
He was finally exposed in 2024 through the government's National Fraud Initiative, which periodically audits payroll databases for anomalies. On Monday, a jury at Southwark Crown Court convicted him of nine counts of fraud, with the judge warning he faces a very substantial custodial sentence. Despite successive managers noting his poor performance—with Defra manager Dan McCartney stating he had to continuously guide him through basic tasks—Chowdhury had managed to secure permanent status due to a lack of formal performance measures.
Source: BBC Politics
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