A UK civil servant who juggled as many as five full-time government jobs at once has been found guilty of fraud after earning more than £284,000 of taxpayers' money dishonestly, the BBC reported. Kashim Chowdhury, 56, had eight overlapping full-time public-sector jobs between 2020 and 2023 and was paid £350,000 in that period. In one month he was contracted to work 183 hours a week — more than the hours in seven days — for the UK Health Security Agency, the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs, the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency, and the Home Office. On Monday he was convicted of nine counts of fraud at Southwark Crown Court and told he faced a "very substantial custodial sentence."

The scheme began to unravel in May 2023, when his UKHSA line manager, Aleesha Adams, joined a video call to plan his return from nearly three months of sick leave. She told the trial he coughed and waved tissues at the camera, and that white powder seemed to be separating from his forehead as he sweated. She claimed he was wearing white makeup to look sick, which he denied. She later noticed he had logged into the call with a Defra email address. When she challenged him, he blamed a technical error. "I believed he was lying," she told the jury, and she escalated her concerns.

The government's National Fraud Initiative flagged suspected fraud to Defra. Investigators arrested and interviewed Chowdhury under caution in July 2023, and he was dismissed from the civil service in September 2023. In court he said a 2015 PTSD diagnosis and a fear of losing his livelihood after insecure employment, including being forced out of a Department for Education job in 2013, led him to take on so many roles. He said he had not been thinking clearly "because of my stress, distress and trauma and due to my panic at the time." Prosecutors called the behaviour "deliberate" and "intentional dishonesty."

The case also raised questions about how he went undetected for so long. Part of the answer, the BBC reported, is that the Civil Service human-resources system is not centralised, and Chowdhury did not declare on application forms that he already held other government jobs. The verified outcome is a jury's guilty verdicts and a forthcoming sentence, plus a documented failure of cross-department checks, not a claim that every civil servant is doing the same thing.