G4S "cleared"

The news slipped through.  The Telegraph reported it briefly, the BBC website more fully.  But, apart from Paul Lewis on Twitter, no one else has noticed, or thinks it's important.  G4S can again bid for government contracts.  Yes, after bodging contracts and then, along with Serco, defrauding the government over the tagging contract to the tune of £109m, the company was temporarily barred from bidding for its slice of public money.  But now, "The Cabinet Office said G4S had taken steps to address weakness in its operations and its 'corporate renewal plan represented the right direction of travel to meet our expectations as a customer'."  And this comes while the Serious Fraud Office is still investigating.  So keen is the government to get G4S back into the fold that they are not even waiting for the outcome of that.  
What's the urgency?  Well, there were those prisons which Grayling wanted to privatise but couldn't because Serco and G4S, the only bidders, had been banished.  And there are more contracts coming up.  We still haven't heard who the providers are to be for Community Work Placements.  And another nice little earner is up for grabs, barely noticed.  This is the Health and Work Service (HWS), contracts to "intervene" in the lives of people who are off work sick and get them back to work.  Read about it here.  It won't be payment by results, and it needs the consent of employees.  One can expect the usual suspects, including A4e and, of course, G4S, to be bidding.
It makes no sense at all to people outside the weird world of government procurement and outsourcing that providers which have failed to deliver and have ripped you off should be welcome to bid again.  The Public Accounts Committee was astonished that previous performance couldn't be taken into account.  

What kind of investigation?

There's plenty of coverage of the removal of one of A4e's contracts today, but most of it just repeats the press release.  We saw at Prime Minister's Questions how the government wants to spin the NAO report; Cameron focussed on how quickly the Work Programme had been got up and running.  It's left to the Guardian and the Yorkshire Post to highlight a significant omission.  
You remember that leaked internal A4e report which showed how much probable and potential fraud was going on?  It was important enough for the BBC to break its vow of silence on the A4e issue.  But it wasn't, apparently, important enough for the DWP to want to look at it.  They didn't ask for it.  Margaret Hodge isn't happy about that, naturally, and wants a more complete investigation.  It raises the question of what kind of investigation the DWP thought it was conducting.  The phrases "whitewash" and "damage limitation" spring to mind.  


Another major point in the National Audit Office report is reported in the Guardian.  "...  allegations against A4e represented just under 10% of cases where fraud was substantiated.  Over 40 cases occurred in other back-to-work companies, representing total losses since 2006 of a quarter of a million pounds.  Out of a total of 126 reported cases of potential fraud the DWP concluded that there was no case to answer in 75 cases. Of the remaining cases, the NAO report said, '24 were of false representation [fraud], 22 of non-compliance' and five were still under investigation. The total losses to fraud since 2006 averaged £129,000 a year, which it described as a 'small' loss in comparison to a total expenditure of £829m on employment schemes in 2011-2012 alone."

An unexpected advert on Twitter from Paul Lewis, who is one of the BBC's financial experts.