Partner and Head of White Collar Crime and Investigations, Chris Roberts, discusses the key proposals in Jonathan Fischer KC’s recently published ‘Fraud in the Digital Age’, in The Law Society Gazette.

Chris’ article was published in The Law Society Gazette, 8 August 2026.

Jonathan Fisher KC’s recently published report, Fraud in the Digital Age, covers a lot of ground. Three proposals stand out for the debate they are likely to generate: a deferred prosecution agreement (DPA) regime for individuals; the redirection of DPA proceeds into the criminal justice system; and financial rewards for whistleblowers.

DPAs for individuals

DPAs in the UK are currently available only to corporates. Fisher KC recommends creating a separate, court-supervised deferred prosecution mechanism for directors, senior managers and other employees implicated in serious corporate economic crime cases (Recommendation 39).

The reasoning is not hard to follow. The SFO has secured high-profile corporate DPAs with major corporations including Rolls-Royce, Tesco, G4S, but has struggled to convert those corporate admissions into convictions against individuals. The G4S prosecution against three former executives was dropped after ten years, and the Serco case collapsed over disclosure failures. Fisher KC’s view is that DPAs risk becoming a shield for senior individuals at the corporate rather than a route to accountability, and his proposed fix is to extend the mechanism to those individuals directly, with binding undertakings such as management disqualification or serious crime prevention order-style restrictions, all subject to judicial oversight.

Mr Fisher KC notes that extending the deferred prosecution regime to individuals was a proposal made in the 2025 Independent Review of Criminal Courts – albeit seemingly only in relation to minor offences, a distinction which is not drawn out.

The difficulty is what this proposal looks like from outside. A corporate cannot go to prison; it can only be fined and/or debarred from bidding for public contracts, which is why a DPA regime for corporates is a coherent proposition. An individual can go to prison, and a scheme that lets some of them negotiate their way out of that will draw some obvious criticisms: first, that the wealthy will be able to buy their way out of jail; second, that those who cannot afford to fight a case may feel pressured into an individual DPA simply because the alternative, a full trial process with an ever-lengthening wait from charge to verdict, is worse. Widening access to a mechanism designed for entities which do not have personal liberty at stake, and applying it to individuals who do, changes its character.

It is also worth noting what is missing from the justification. Unlike the new failure to prevent fraud offence, this does not appear to be a proposal for which law enforcement appear to have asked. Whilst it would give prosecutors another tool and would appear to align the individual and corporate regimes, even then it would only be for certain individuals (directors and employees) for certain (economic crime) offences.

Reinvesting DPA proceeds

DPAs generate fines and disgorgement. Currently these go into the Consolidated Fund and are absorbed into general Treasury revenue. Fisher recommends that proceeds of DPAs instead be injected into the criminal justice system, with a proportion ring-fenced for economic crime enforcement (Recommendation 40).

The figures make the case for themselves. The Rolls-Royce settlement alone generated over £239 million in penalties and £258 million in disgorgement in the UK; Tesco paid over £128 million; Airbus contributed over €980 million in the UK. The report notes that the Tesco settlement alone was equivalent to 11% of the annual criminal legal aid budget. Reinvesting even a portion of money generated by enforcing economic crime law in the (underfunded) system that produced it, rather than treating it as general revenue, is highly appealing, and it is to be hoped this recommendation is both welcomed and implemented.

Paying whistleblowers

UK prosecutors, led by the Serious Fraud Office, have been asking for the power to financially reward whistleblowers and Mr Fisher KC recommends legislating for it with a government consultation to design the scheme (Recommendation 15). The proposal draws on US practice, the False Claims Act, the SEC and CFTC programmes, the IRS Whistleblower Office, where financial incentives have produced large numbers of tips and, in some cases, substantial recoveries.

This does not stand alone. Mr Fisher KC recommends it is tied in to what amounts to a framework for a statutory whistleblowing regime: a new criminal offence for knowingly submitting false reports under the scheme (Recommendation 16), a criminal offence for harassing or intimidating whistleblowers (Recommendation 17), and an independent arbitration panel to hear whistleblower appeals and complaints (Recommendation 18).

Rewarding whistleblowers addresses a genuine gap. The report cites evidence that the UK whistleblowers avail themselves of US whistleblower programmes because there is no comparable domestic incentive. Protecting whistleblowers from retaliation and policing false reports are sensible safeguards for any reward scheme, and an arbitration panel gives whistleblowers an independent avenue to resolve disputes. The open question is practical rather than principled. Where the legislative time and the funding for a criminal offence, an arbitration panel and a reward scheme are going to come from, at a time when the criminal justice system is already stretched. The proceeds of DPAs, perhaps? Recommendation 15 asks for a consultation rather than legislating outright, which suggests Mr Fisher KC recognises the design work still to be done.

The common thread

Taken together, these three proposals sit at different points on a spectrum from principled to expedient. The individual DPA proposal is the one that will need the clearest answer, when it comes, to the question of why a mechanism built around corporate liability should be extended to people who can be sent to prison. The proposal to reinvest the proceeds of DPAs is relatively uncontroversial. The whistleblower package is sound in concept but resource-dependent. What remains to be seen, as a new Prime Minister and new Justice Secretary settle in, is whether there is political will to grapple with the issues and engage with the recommendations proposed by Mr Fisher KC.