Yahoo Finance Furlough fraud claims double to 2,000 in a month as employers exploit scheme at taxpayers' expense
Furlough fraud claims being investigated by HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) have more than doubled in a month to almost 2,000, official figures show.
HMRC said that by the end of last month it had received 1,868 reports of bosses or staff defrauding the exchequer by falsely claiming taxpayers’ cash for furloughing, up from 795 on May 13.
Protect, the UK’s whistleblowing charity, said it had been inundated with a record number of complaints during lockdown with furlough fraud dominating calls to its helpline.
“Our advice line has never in our 27-year history been as busy, and furlough fraud is the single biggest public interest concern we have been supporting people with,” said Andrew Pepper-Parsons, Protect’s head of policy.
Some whistleblowers have been threatened with the sack if they did not continue working after being furloughed by their bosses so they could claim 80 per cent of their pay packet from the taxpayer, according to the charity.
One of the major scams is where a firm has furloughed staff but gets them to continue to work or volunteer unpaid.
Others have been furloughed but not told and only find out when they are paid. A third scam is where a firm has claimed furlough cash for a “ghost” employee who may be someone they dismissed or “recruited” so they could claim the money.
Protect said it had seen a 49 per cent increase in calls during the coronavirus crisis compared to the same period last year, of which 31 per cent related to furlough fraud.
Of all the Covid-19 calls, 48 per cent were about furlough fraud, of which the hospitality sector accounted for the most at 17 per cent, followed by manufacturing (13 per cent), retail (13 per cent), food (11 per cent), construction and education (eight per cent each).
Protect believes it could be an underestimate of the scale of the fraud as HMRC has closed its telephone hotline during the lockdown because staff have been working from home.
It urged HMRC to reopen it to give people an alternative to online reporting.
HMRC said furlough fraud “deprived public services of essential funding” and urged anyone aware of such abuses to contact its digital online reporting service.
“It could be that you’re not being paid what you’re entitled to, they might be asking you to work while you’re on furlough, or they may have claimed for times when you were working,” said an HMRC spokesman.
