Bank frauds almost halve during the pandemic

The first pandemic year saw a decline in the amount of bank frauds across the country, according to the latest data available with the Ministry of Finance. While in FY20 a whopping ₹27,698.38 crore was involved in bank frauds across States, the amount was less than half in FY21 — ₹11,583 crore.

At the same time, in the current financial year, the first nine months saw bank frauds of ₹648 crore. The numbers were quite high five years ago, for instance ₹61,229 crore in FY17. Between FY16 and the ongoing financial year, Maharashtra saw bank frauds of ₹1.25 lakh crore, while in New Delhi, it stood at ₹40,860 crore and ₹13,520 crore in Telangana.

Detection, reporting

Responding to a question in the Rajya Sabha, Minister of State for Finance Bhagwat Karad said, improved detection and reporting along with comprehensive steps resulted in a sharp decline of these frauds. He added that over the last six financial years, a total of ₹55,895 crore was involved in banks frauds and was recovered.

“Further, as per the RBI data, during the last six financial years and the first six months of the current financial year, scheduled commercial banks have effected an aggregate recovery of ₹7,34,542 crore, in NPAs and written-off loan accounts, including those reported as fraud,” the minister said.

4 States, 2 UTs

However, a deeper analysis of the data that was presented at the Rajya Sabha on March 15 said four States —Jharkhand, Kerala, Meghalaya and Nagaland, and the Union Territories of Jammu and Kashmir and Ladakh saw more bank frauds from March to December 2021, compared to FY21.

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In fact, Kerala’s bank fraud amount stood at ₹24.87 crore in the last financial year, but the amount is ₹59.77 crore until December 2021. In FY20, Kerala’s bank fraud amount was ₹45.10 crore. States like Goa, Himachal Pradesh and Tripura, on the other hand, reporter higher bank frauds during the pandemic year.

SBI improves

According to the ministry’s data, until December 2021, the scheduled commercial banks in the country have reported as many as 2,731 instances of bank frauds. Kotak Mahindra Bank saw the maximum number of these incidents — 642, followed by IDBI Bank (518) and IndusInd Bank (377).

The State Bank of India, on the other hand, has improved its numbers. While the bank saw 751 frauds in 2016-17 and 923 and 931 incidents each in FY18 and FY19, in the following financial years, its numbers have been 673 and 283, and 159 between March and December 2021.