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

Aleesha Adams joined a video call with Kashim Chowdhury in May 2023.

He'd been on sick leave from his job at the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) for nearly three months and Adams, his line manager, wanted to put a plan in action to ease him back into work.

At the start of the call, Chowdhury was coughing and waving tissues up to the camera in an attempt to show how ill he was. But what really caught Adams' attention was how pale he looked.

She noticed white powder had started separating from his forehead. "He was sweating, it was like rubbing off, so it was darker underneath and darker on the neck," she told his trial.

She claimed he was wearing white make-up to look sick. Something he denied in court.

Little did she know UKHSA was not Chowdhury's only employer.

That month, he was also being paid to work full-time for the Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office. He was contracted to work 183 hours a week – more than the number of hours in seven days. He fraudulently earned more than £284,000 of taxpayers' money.

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.

Soon after her call with Chowdhury, Adams discovered that he had logged into the call using a Defra email address. When she challenged him about it, he blamed it on a technical error. She told the jury at his trial at Southwark Crown Court: "I believed he was lying." She escalated her concerns up the chain.

But his fraudulent behaviour remained undetected. 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, such as payroll, every two years to look for anomalies.

On Monday he was found guilty of nine counts of fraud and told by the judge that he would be facing a "very substantial custodial sentence".

Chowdhury, 56, arrived each day at court alone. He is married, yet there never seemed to be any friends or family there to support him.

He would often make his way down the corridors of the court building carrying two plastic carrier bags, with a bobble hat perched on his head.

He sometimes looked bewildered in the witness box.

Chowdhury, who had a diagnosis of PTSD in 2015, said that he had taken on so many roles because he feared losing his livelihood after experiencing insecure employment. He said he'd been forced out of a job at the Department for Education in 2013.

He said he hadn't been thinking clearly when applying for jobs ''because of my stress, distress and trauma and due to my panic at the time".

But the prosecution argued his behaviour was "deliberate" and "intentional dishonesty" and that he had exploited the system.

However, the case raises important questions for the Civil Service. How was he able to get away with it for so long?

Part of the explanation is that the Civil Service's human resources system is not centralised. Chowdhury did not declare on government application forms that he was already a civil servant, so the system did not spot the duplication.

Hannah Keenan, who works at the Institute for Government, says the system clearly failed. "Government departments are taking hiring decisions independently of each other and without systems that join up," she said.

"That the model and the culture surrounding it aren't working shouldn't be a surprise though - we've known for a long time about poor performers flying under the radar by shuffling between jobs."

There are more than 550,000 people employed across the Civil Service, many in offices in Whitehall, in central London. They are responsible for carrying out government policy and the daily administration of the country.

Another reason why Chowdhury's fraud went undetected is that he was working entirely from the east London house he shared with his mother. In 2023, she had dementia and terminal cancer, and he told his employers that he needed to be at home to look after her.

But rather than reducing his workload to concentrate on her care, he took on more jobs. He covered up his impossible daily schedule by getting sick notes from his GP.

In April 2023, he was off with what he called "mixed anxiety and depressive disorder" from Defra, the UKHSA, the Department for Business and Trade and the Food Standards Agency.

While the sick notes were shown to the jury, they were not given evidence about what caused the depressive disorder or of a psychiatric assessment having been done during this period.

His sickness did not prevent him from starting yet another job – this time at the Home Office. He did not mention to them he was ill, nor did he tell them he was working elsewhere.

Unsurprisingly, a succession of his line managers told the jury he had not been very good at his jobs.

Especially damning was the evidence given by Dan McCartney, who managed Chowdhury at Defra. He said he had to "effectively tell him what to do the whole time" and that Chowdhury kept his camera off during video calls for four months, claiming technical problems.

But because Chowdhury was not subject to any formal performance measures at Defra, he was given a permanent job. He remained there for two years.

In September 2023, Chowdhury was found to have more than £40,000 in his bank accounts as well as significant investments, including £45,000 in premium bonds.

A recent survey of 1,700 civil servants by the independent think tank Re:State found 76% of respondents thought it did not do a good job of tackling poor performers.

An ex-senior civil servant told the BBC that much of the Civil Service is culturally averse to performance management.

"Whitehall's known for ages it has to be less risk averse. Shrinking the Civil Service and the adoption of artificial intelligence technology make that more vital," they said.

"But don't underestimate the fear factor: fear of drawn-out grievances and fear of being accused of wasting taxpayers' money if the Civil Service was to do what big private sector firms do, which is cut to get rid of poor performers by offering some money and a settlement agreement."

A Defra spokesperson said: "Kashim Chowdhury abused the trust placed in him as a public servant and defrauded taxpayers out of almost £285,000. He will now rightly face the consequences for his actions.

"This conviction is the result of a thorough and painstaking investigation led by the Defra Counter Fraud and Investigations team. It sends a clear message that fraud against the public purse will not be tolerated and those responsible will be held to account."

The spokesperson said Defra would use "all available avenues to recover the proceeds of Chowdhury's offending on behalf of taxpayers".

Chowdhury's case also illustrates a wider issue.

He was engaged in what is being called "polygamous working", where people hold down several jobs secretly. Websites have even been set up offering people advice on how to keep their employers in the dark.

Its rise has been blamed on larger numbers of people working from home.

The government's National Fraud Initiative has identified 23 cases of "polygamous working" across London in its most recent report. It uncovered £500,000 of overpaid salaries over a period of a few months.

Alongside the fraud case, Chowdhury is involved in a legal dispute with his three siblings, who accuse him of ''bullying'' their mother into signing over half of her £2.1m home to him in the final days of her life. He denies it.

At times during his criminal trial, Chowdhury appeared confused by what he was hearing and blamed trauma for the web of lies he had spun. The jury took seven hours to reach their verdict and decided he was motivated by personal gain - stealing tens of thousands of pounds from the taxpayer.

Chowdhury now faces a significant custodial sentence.