Treasury winds up pandemic support fraud squad A Treasury anti-fraud squad set up to recover money stolen from the Government’s pandemic support schemes is to be wound up. The Taxpayer Protection Taskforce was set up in March 2021 and involved 1,265 experts working with HMRC to try to get back cash stolen or wrongly claimed from the Treasury’s emergency schemes. The Treasury said it would be able to get back only between £800m and £1bn of about £5.8bn stolen or incorrectly taken by workers and businesses from government support programmes. The £5.8bn is 7% of the £81.2bn spent on the schemes during the pandemic. The Treasury has now revised down estimates of the amount its taskforce would recoup to between £525m and £625m. This is up to £375m less than originally intended. Officials are to “wind down” the taskforce from next March and return all staff to “business-as-usual tax compliance work” by September.