In May 2023, Aleesha Adams had a video call with Kashim Chowdhury.
At that time, Chowdhury had been on leave for nearly three months due to illness. He works for the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA), and as his immediate supervisor, Adams wanted to develop a plan to help him gradually return to work.
As soon as the call began, Choudhury kept coughing and holding tissues in front of the camera in an attempt to prove that he was seriously ill. But what really caught Adams' attention was that he looked unusually pale.
She noticed that the white powder on his forehead began to fall off. She told the court: "He had been sweating and it looked like it had been wiped off and the skin underneath was darker, also on his neck."
She suspected that Chaudhry wore white makeup to look sick. He denied the charge in court.
Fraud that never came to light
What Adams didn't know at the time was that UKHSA was not Chaudhry's only employer.
In the same month, he was employed by the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office, all on a full-time basis. His contract hours totaled 183 hours per week, even more than the total number of hours in a week. Through fraudulent means, he defrauded taxpayers of more than 284,000 pounds (US$379,400; RMB 2,532,700; NT$12,501,400).
Between 2020 and 2023, he held a total of eight overlapping full-time public sector jobs at the same time. This relatively junior civil servant received a salary of 350,000 pounds during this period.
Shortly after speaking to Chaudhry, Adams discovered that he had logged into the video conference using a Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs email address. She questioned him, but he blamed it on a technical glitch.
"I believe he is lying," she told the jury during the trial at London's Southwark Crown Court. She immediately raised her concerns with higher-level supervisors.
However, Chaudhry's fraud remained unexplored. He was able to hold multiple government jobs at the same time until he left the civil service in September 2023.
It wasn't until 2024 that the government's National Fraud Initiative uncovered the incident. The program checks civil service databases every two years for anomalies, including pay records.
On Monday (November 9), Chaudhry was found guilty of nine counts of fraud. The judge told him he faced a "very long custodial sentence".
Chaudhry, 56, attends court alone every day. He was married, but he never seemed to have friends or family present in court to support him.
He often walks along the corridors of the court building wearing a fur ball hat and carrying two plastic shopping bags.
At times, he looked bewildered on the witness stand.
Chaudhry was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 2015. He said he took on so many jobs because he had experienced unstable employment in the past and was afraid of losing his livelihood. He said he was forced to leave a job at the Ministry of Education in 2013.
He said that when he applied for a job, he couldn't think clearly "because of stress, pain and trauma, plus inner panic."
However, the prosecution countered that his behavior was "deliberate" and "intentional fraud", and he took advantage of loopholes in the system to seek benefits.
This case has also raised important questions in the civil service system: How can he hide the truth for so long?
One of the reasons is that the human resources management system of the civil service system is not centrally managed. Choudhury did not declare that he was already a civil servant on his government job application form, so the system failed to detect double employment.
Hannah Keenan of the Institute for Government think tank said the system was clearly failing.
"Each government department makes recruitment decisions independently, and there is no system for exchanging information between them," she said.
"However, it is not surprising that this model and the culture behind it do not work. We have long known that some low-performing employees will move between different positions to avoid detection."
There are more than 550,000 employees in the British civil service, many of whom work in government offices in Whitehall, central London. They are responsible for implementing government policies and handling the day-to-day administrative affairs of the country.
Another reason Chaudhry's fraud went undetected was that he worked entirely out of the home he shared with his mother in east London. In 2023, his mother suffered from dementia and terminal cancer. He told his employer that he needed to stay home and take care of his mother.
However, instead of reducing his workload so that he could focus on caring for his mother, he took on more work. He concealed his impossible daily work schedule by asking his family doctor for sick leave certificates.
In April 2023, he took sick leave from the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the British Health and Safety Authority, the Department for Business and Trade, and the Food Standards Agency, citing what he called "mixed anxiety and depression."
The jury was provided with relevant sick leave certificates but received no evidence as to the cause of his depression or that he had received psychiatric evaluation during this period.
Even while on sick leave, he started another new job, this time with the Interior Ministry. He did not tell his new employer that he was ill or that he was employed elsewhere at the same time.
As expected, several direct supervisors told the jury that Choudhury's work performance had been unsatisfactory.
Among them, the evidence given by Dan McCartney, who once managed Chaudhry at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, was particularly unfavorable.
He said he almost "almost always had to tell him directly what to do." Choudhury even turned off the camera during video conferences for four consecutive months, claiming to have encountered technical problems.
However, because Choudhury did not receive any formal performance evaluation at the department, he was eventually hired on a permanent basis and worked there for two years.
In September 2023, investigators discovered that Chaudhry had more than 40,000 pounds in deposits in his bank account, and also held a large number of investments, including British Government Savings Bonds (Premium Bonds) worth 45,000 pounds.
A civil service system that is "afraid of taking risks"
Independent think tank Re:State recently surveyed 1,700 civil servants and found that 76% of respondents believed the civil service did a poor job of dealing with underperforming employees.
A former senior civil servant told the BBC that there was a general cultural reluctance in the civil service to deal with staff performance issues.
He said: "Whitehall has long known that it must be less risk-averse. As the number of civil servants shrinks and artificial intelligence technology becomes more widespread, this becomes even more important."
"But don't underestimate the fear factor: on the one hand, there's the fear of dealing with a lengthy grievance process; on the other hand, there's also the fear of being accused of wasting taxpayers' money if the civil service, like large private companies, lays off underperforming employees by paying a lump sum and reaching a settlement agreement."
A spokesman for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: "Kashim Choudhury abused the trust he received as a public servant and defrauded taxpayers of nearly £285,000. He now deserves to face the consequences of his actions."
"This conviction is the result of a comprehensive and meticulous investigation by the Anti-Fraud and Investigation Team of the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs. The case sends a clear message: Government funds will not be defrauded and offenders must be held accountable."
A recent report by the government's National Fraud Investigation Program found 23 cases of "multiple employment" in London. In just a few months, the investigation uncovered excess pay totaling £500,000.
In addition to the criminal fraud case, Chaudhry is also embroiled in legal troubles with three siblings. They accuse Chaudhry of "bullying" his mother into signing documents to transfer half of her £2.1 million home to him in her final days. He denies the charges.
At times during the criminal interrogation, Chaudhry seemed confused by what he was hearing and blamed trauma for the lies he spun. The jury took seven hours to reach a verdict that he committed the crime for personal gain and stole tens of thousands of pounds from taxpayers.
Chaudhry now faces a lengthy prison sentence.
