Partner and Head of White Collar Crime and Investigations, Chris Roberts, discusses the practical considerations around the recommendations made in Jonathan Fisher KC’s report on Fraud in the Digital Age, in New Law Journal.

Chris’ article was published in New Law Journal, 10 September 2026.

Jonathan Fisher KC’s report on Fraud in the Digital Age makes a significant number of proposals across a wide range of issues. With 47 recommendations, it covers everything from AI-assisted disclosure to jury trials in complex fraud cases.

Three proposals, however, have caught the eye: a deferred prosecution mechanism for individuals; the ring-fencing of DPA proceeds for reinvestment into the criminal justice system; and a statutory scheme to reward whistleblowers financially.

As is probably reflective of all the 47 recommendations, each responds to a genuine problem but faces hurdles to being implemented.

A DPA regime for individuals

DPAs have been available to corporates in England and Wales since 2014, pursuant to Schedule 17 to the Crime and Courts Act 2013. They have never been available to individuals. Recommendation 39 proposes changing that: a separate, statutory, court-supervised deferred prosecution mechanism for directors, senior managers and, ‘where justified’, other employees materially implicated in serious corporate economic crime.

The background lies in the successful agreement of DPAs with corporates, but with little, if any success against individuals involved in the events giving rise to those DPAs. The Serious Fraud Office (SFO) has secured a string of high-profile corporate DPAs – Rolls-Royce, Tesco, G4S, Serco Geografix, and, this year, Ultra Electronics – but has a poor record of translating the underlying admissions of corporate wrongdoing into convictions against the individuals involved. The G4S prosecution of three former executives collapsed in 2023 after ten years, with the SFO citing ‘multi-faceted’ reasons and the ‘potential unfairness’ of continuing; the Serco prosecution fell apart over ‘insurmountable problems’ with disclosure; the Tesco executives prosecuted for the same conduct underlying that company’s 2017 DPA had their charges dismissed by the trial judge. Most recently, the SFO’s DPA with Guralp Systems was announced on the same day that three individuals were acquitted.

This pattern has led to the principal criticism of DPAs: they allow companies to admit serious wrongdoing while the individuals responsible walk away – an accountability gap that is said to undermine both deterrence and public confidence in the regime.

Transparency International UK has argued that by agreeing DPAs, companies are effectively ‘buying their way out’ of justice. Reacting to the UK’s first DPA in 2015, TI-UK warned that a DPA ‘should not allow companies and individuals to buy their way out of punishments’ and called for any DPA to be paired with a commitment to prosecute the directors and senior managers active or complicit in the underlying corruption. After Rolls-Royce’s 2017 settlement, its then executive director Robert Barrington argued it was for a DPA to ‘serve as a proper deterrent for companies’, then ‘those involved with or who sanctioned bribery must be prosecuted individually.’

Yet Mr Fisher KC’s Recommendation 39 takes a different route: it proposes giving individuals their own negotiated settlement, modelled on the corporate mechanism that campaigners say enables individuals involved in the underlying facts to escape scrutiny.

However the rationale for a corporate DPA does not transpose cleanly onto individuals. No corporate can be sent to prison; it can only be fined, debarred from public contracts or subjected to compliance monitoring – which is precisely why a negotiated resolution short of conviction can be a coherent response to corporate offending. An individual facing serious fraud charges can be sent to prison, and a scheme letting some defendants negotiate their way out of that risk invites an obvious criticism: that the wealthy will be able to buy their way out of jail, while those who cannot afford to contest a case may feel pressed to agree a DPA simply because the alternative is worse.

Mr Fisher KC does build in safeguards. Individual DPAs would sit alongside, not replace, corporate liability; they would be judicially supervised; and they could incorporate binding undertakings such as management disqualification or being subject to serious crime prevention orders. None of that answers the more basic question of institutional demand. Unlike the new failure to prevent fraud offence under the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Act 2023, which law enforcement had been pressing for, Recommendation 39 is not a proposal that came from the SFO or any other agency.

Mr Fisher KC notes that extending the deferred prosecution regime to individuals was a proposal made in the 2025 Independent Review of Criminal Courts (IRCC) – albeit that was in fact a proposal to expand the proposed Deferred Prosecution Scheme (DPS) for minor offences to encompass serious economic crime offences, a distinction which is not drawn out. Indeed, part of the justification for DPSs cited by the IRCC was one police force area finding a significant reduction in new charges for ‘young adults’ i.e., aged between 18 and 21. It is difficult to see that logic applying equally to serious economic crime offences.

The report itself frames the rationale as giving law enforcement ‘more tools’ and aligning the regimes for individuals and corporates. For a reform this consequential, that may not be enough.

Reinvesting the proceeds of DPAs

This proposal is unlikely to generate resistance on the basis of principle. Recommendation 40 would see proceeds of DPAs injected into the criminal justice system, with a proportion ring-fenced specifically for economic crime enforcement.

At present, DPA fines and disgorgement go into the Consolidated Fund and are absorbed into general Treasury revenue rather than earmarked for reinvestment. The sums involved are not trivial. The UK share of the Rolls-Royce settlement alone exceeded £239m in penalties and £258m in disgorgement; Tesco paid almost £129m; Airbus contributed over €980m. Mr Fisher KC’s report notes that the Tesco settlement was equivalent to roughly 11% of the annual criminal legal aid budget.

The public is all to keenly aware of the underfunding of the criminal justice system, whether dilapidated courts or overcrowded prisons. Treating the proceeds of economic crime enforcement as ordinary Exchequer revenue, rather than reinvesting even a portion in the system that generated them, is not an easy position to defend in light of those stresses, and Recommendation 40 is likely to find support across the profession, the enforcement agencies and civil society alike.

Paying whistleblowers

The proposal to remunerate genuine whistleblowers has firm institutional backing. The SFO has been actively pushing for the power to pay whistleblowers, its current and former leadership have advocated for it, and Recommendation 15 responds directly: legislative provision for the SFO to financially reward whistleblowers, informed by a government consultation on the design of the scheme.

According to analysis from Spotlight on Corruption, UK nationals are the second-largest users of US whistleblower programmes, with 774 individuals reporting to American authorities between 2012 and 2023 – information that, absent a comparable domestic scheme, UK law enforcement never sees. The organisation has also highlighted the scale of what reward-driven reporting can achieve in the US: in 2022, 86% of the $2.2bn recovered by the Department of Justice through civil fraud cases involving government funds derived from whistleblower tips, and the Securities and Exchange Commission has imposed over $6.3bn in penalties on the strength of whistleblower information over the past decade. Mr Fisher KC’s own commissioned Ipsos polling found 70% public support for a UK reward scheme, undercutting the frequently heard objection that incentivising whistleblowers is culturally alien on this side of the Atlantic.

As well as incentivisation, there is another issue to be considered: protection, not just reward. Consider the case of Jonathan Taylor, whose evidence helped secure hundreds of millions of dollars in fines against SBM Offshore, yet who was left facing a retaliatory lawsuit and an Interpol Red Notice with little institutional support. This example underlines why Recommendation 15 must not stand alone.

Recommendations 16 to 18 therefore matter as much as the reward itself. It is those three further proposals that, together, sketch the framework for a statutory whistleblowing regime:

• Recommendation 16: a new criminal offence for knowingly submitting false reports under the scheme, with an explicit carve-out protecting those who neither know nor suspect their information to be false;
• Recommendation 17: a new criminal offence of harassing or intimidating whistleblowers; and
• Recommendation 18: an independent arbitration panel to hear whistleblower appeals and complaints.

Each element addresses a real risk. A reward scheme without protection against false reporting invites abuse; without anti-harassment provisions, genuine whistleblowers remain exposed to the kind of well-resourced retaliation that Mr Fisher KC’s report acknowledges can come from organisations; and without an arbitration route, disputes over eligibility or reward size have no clear forum for resolution. Design questions remain – who sets the size of the reward (Mr Fisher KC favours the SFO itself over a judge), how eligibility interacts with those already under a statutory duty to report, and whether a coordinating ‘Office of the Whistleblower’ should follow – but these are exactly what a consultation ought to resolve.

What is harder to resolve is resourcing. Running a credible scheme is not free: Mr Fisher KC notes that US agencies appear to dedicate substantial personnel to assessing whistleblower tipoffs, and even then fewer than 1% of SEC disclosures result in a reward. There is also a courtroom dimension: a whistleblower known to be pursuing a reward is a more exposed witness, which could push prosecutors towards corroborating testimony independently rather than relying on it.

None of this undermines the case for the scheme, but it is unclear where the parliamentary time or funding for a package spanning two new criminal offences and a new arbitration body is going to come from.

The common constraint

Read together, the three proposals sit at different points on a spectrum from principled to expedient. Reinvestment is close to uncontroversial. The whistleblower package is evidentially strong and institutionally backed, but resource-hungry. The individual DPA proposal will need the clearest justification if it reaches legislation, given existing concerns that the existing regime already lets individuals escape accountability too easily.

What unites all three, in the end, is not principle but capacity. Each assumes legislative time and public money that a justice system with a Crown Court backlog of (as at autumn 2025) 80,000 cases may struggle to find. Whilst Mr Fisher KC’s diagnosis is, in each case, hard to argue with, it is delivery where the real debate will happen.