How a Civil Servant Held Eight Overlapping Public-Sector Jobs and Took £284,000 Undetected

In May 2023, Aleesha Adams, a line manager at the UK Health Security Agency, joined a video call with an employee who had been on sick leave for almost three months. She wanted to agree a plan to bring Kashim Chowdhury back to work. He opened the call coughing and holding tissues up to the camera. What struck her was how pale he looked. As he sweated, she said, white powder seemed to lift from his forehead, leaving darker skin underneath and on his neck. She told his trial she believed he was wearing white make-up. He denied that in court.

Adams did not know that UKHSA was only one of his employers. That same month he was also being paid to work full-time at the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra), the Department for Business and Trade, the Food Standards Agency and the Home Office. His contracts added up to 183 hours a week, more than the number of hours in seven days. Between 2020 and 2023 he held eight overlapping full-time public-sector jobs and was paid £350,000, of which more than £284,000 was ruled fraudulent.

Soon after the call, Adams found he had logged in with a Defra email address. When she challenged him, he blamed a technical error. "I believed he was lying," she told the jury at Southwark Crown Court, and she escalated her concerns. Even so, he kept working in multiple government jobs until he left the Civil Service in September 2023. He was caught in 2024 by the National Fraud Initiative, which searches Civil Service databases such as payroll every two years for anomalies. On Monday he was found guilty of nine counts of fraud, and the judge warned him to expect a "very substantial custodial sentence".

Chowdhury is 56. He arrived at court alone each day, carrying two plastic carrier bags and wearing a bobble hat, and no friends or family appeared to support him. In the witness box he sometimes looked bewildered. He had been diagnosed with PTSD in 2015 and told the court he took on so many roles because he feared losing his livelihood after insecure employment, including being forced out of a job at the Department for Education in 2013. He said stress, distress and trauma left him not thinking clearly, and that he panicked. Prosecutors called his conduct deliberate, intentional dishonesty. The jury took seven hours to decide he was motivated by personal gain.

How he went unnoticed comes down partly to the structure of the system. Civil Service HR is not centralised, and Chowdhury did not say on application forms that he was already a civil servant, so nothing flagged the duplication. Hannah Keenan of the Institute for Government said departments take hiring decisions independently, without joined-up systems, and that it should be no surprise the model is failing, given long-known problems with poor performers shuffling between jobs. The Civil Service employs more than 550,000 people.

He also worked entirely from the east London house he shared with his mother, who in 2023 had dementia and terminal cancer. He told employers he needed to be home to care for her, yet took on more jobs rather than fewer. He covered his impossible schedule with GP sick notes. In April 2023 he was off sick from Defra, UKHSA, Business and Trade and the Food Standards Agency, citing what he called mixed anxiety and depressive disorder. The jury saw the notes but heard no evidence of the cause or of any psychiatric assessment in that period. He then started at the Home Office without mentioning illness or his other work.

His managers said he performed poorly. Dan McCartney, who managed him at Defra, said he had to effectively tell him what to do the whole time, and that Chowdhury kept his camera off for four months, citing technical problems. With no formal performance measures in place, Defra made him permanent, and he stayed two years. In September 2023 he was found to hold over £40,000 in bank accounts and significant investments, including £45,000 in premium bonds.

A Re:State survey of 1,700 civil servants found 76% felt the service handles poor performers badly. An ex-senior civil servant told the BBC of a culture averse to performance management, citing fear of drawn-out grievances and of being accused of wasting public money on settlement agreements. The case also reflects "polygamous working", where people secretly hold several jobs, which has been blamed on home working. The National Fraud Initiative found 23 such cases across London in its latest report, with £500,000 of overpaid salary over a few months.

Separately, Chowdhury is in a legal dispute with his three siblings, who accuse him of bullying their mother into signing over half her £2.1m home in her final days. He denies it. Defra says it will use all available avenues to recover the proceeds, and sentencing is still to come.