How a civil servant got away with juggling five jobs for so long

Kashim Chowdhury, a civil servant, was convicted of fraud after pocketing £284,000 of taxpayers' money over three years.

He had been working for various government departments, including the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency, and the Home Office.

Chowdhury was found guilty of nine counts of fraud and faced a 'very substantial custodial sentence' after being caught in 2024 by the government's National Fraud Initiative.

Chowdhury had been juggling five jobs for so long that he was not declared as a civil servant on government application forms, allowing him to keep multiple government jobs without detection.

In total, he had eight overlapping full-time public-sector jobs between 2020 and 2023. During that time, this relatively junior civil servant was paid £350,000.

He fraudulently earned more than £284,000 of taxpayers' money by working as a contractor for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency, and the Home Office.

Chowdhury was able to keep working multiple government jobs until September 2023 when he left the Civil Service. He was finally caught in 2024 by the government's National Fraud Initiative, which conducts searches of Civil Service databases every two years to look for anomalies.