ECCTA Failure to Prevent Fraud — Advisory & Compliance Support
The failure to prevent fraud duty under ECCTA Part 4 came into force on 1 September 2025. If your organisation has not yet completed a gap analysis or assessed the adequacy of your fraud prevention procedures, that work is overdue.
What the duty requires
The core question the failure to prevent fraud duty asks is whether your organisation has reasonable procedures in place to prevent fraud being committed for its benefit. The Home Office guidance sets out six principles, but it does not prescribe what reasonable looks like for your firm.
That is a judgement your board will need to make — and support with evidence. Without a documented assessment, your organisation cannot rely on the reasonable procedures defence if a prosecution arises.
Where most firms are right now
Based on our conversations across the sector, most firms have acknowledged the duty but fall into one of four positions:
- The board has been briefed but no gap analysis has been commissioned
- The compliance team has mapped the guidance but is uncertain how to assess control adequacy
- Initial work has been completed internally but requires independent validation before board presentation
- Internal audit is planning to cover ECCTA but needs external SME input to do so credibly
All four positions are addressable. The starting point is understanding where your organisation stands today.
Our experience in this area
Our work in this space draws on direct experience of financial crime audit and advisory in UK financial services, including firms that have been through FCA enforcement, Consent Orders, and s166 skilled person reviews. We understand how regulators assess the adequacy of financial crime frameworks, and we apply that lens to ECCTA advisory work.
We are not a law firm. We do not provide legal advice on the application of the duty to your specific circumstances — your legal advisers should cover that ground. What we provide is practical, operationally grounded advisory: the kind that helps you actually build the procedures and evidence the board needs, rather than produce a report that sits in a drawer.
Practical support across the full ECCTA lifecycle
We help firms from initial assessment through to independent validation and board reporting.
Gap analysis & risk assessment
We work through your business model, existing fraud risk framework, and current controls against the six Home Office principles. The output is a clear, board-ready assessment — not a generic template.
Procedures adequacy review
If you have already developed fraud prevention procedures, we can review them for adequacy against the guidance and against what regulators and prosecutors are likely to consider reasonable for a firm of your type and size.
Audit support & assurance
For internal audit functions planning to cover ECCTA in their audit plan, we provide subject matter expertise to support scoping, fieldwork, and reporting — drawing on direct financial crime audit experience.
Board & senior management briefing
We support firms in preparing clear, accurate board briefings on the duty. Boards have personal accountability for the adequacy of procedures. They need to understand the substance, not just the headline.
Firms that fall within scope
This service is primarily relevant to:
- Large UK companies and LLPs meeting the Companies Act size thresholds
- UK subsidiaries of large overseas groups
- Financial services firms with existing financial crime frameworks that need to be assessed against the ECCTA duty
- Internal audit teams that need SME support to deliver credible ECCTA audit coverage
If you are a smaller firm below the size thresholds, the duty does not apply directly — but demonstrating reasonable fraud prevention procedures remains good governance and is increasingly expected by counterparties and investors.
Ready to understand where your firm stands?
The most common thing we hear from firms on ECCTA is that they know they need to act but are not sure where to start. A short initial conversation — thirty minutes, no charge — is usually enough to establish what you need and whether we are the right people to help.