Guilty of fraud

We've waited a long time for the outcome of this trial, but it finished today with a guilty verdict on ten A4e employees in Slough (three more were acquitted).  There's a brief write-up on the BBC news website and a better one on the Slough Express site.  
They were working on a lone parent mentoring programme called Aspire to Inspire (I kid you not) which paid A4e for job outcomes in much the same way as the Work Programme.  The convictions are for fraud and forgery, with two of them also guilty of conspiracy.  The local paper says that "The fake claims were discovered though a whistleblower report, which led to an investigation by the department of Work and Pensions and Thames Valley Police," whereas Andrew Dutton, A4e's boss, has always claimed that A4e found the fraud themselves.  Whichever, as we suspected, the motive was to claim the bonuses the company offered for successful job outcomes.  "Financial rewards had been introduced," said the police spokesman, and pointed out that, "The money they fraudulently claimed came from the taxpayer and just over £1.3m was paid to A4e between 2008 and 2010 for their implementation of this contract."
A4e announced some time back that they no longer offer individual bonuses.  A couple of years ago they seriously annoyed many manager-level staff by withdrawing all bonuses, which meant something like a 20% pay cut.  It also has to be remembered that this was a paper-based claims system, which was wide open to fraud without rigorous auditing.  All you had to do was fill in the claims form with a fictitious job and put a false signature on it.  Clearly, this A4e office didn't do it occasionally; they thought they could get away with it on a grand scale.
Sentencing has been deferred until 30 March.
This isn't on the scale of the fraud by G4S and Serco.  But it's bad enough.

Bad news and no news

There's a bit of news today which provides no comfort for A4e.  Big reforms to pensions come in next year, and the government has recognised that people will need advice and guidance.  It was expected that the Money Advice Service (MAS) would be the outfit to deliver that; but no.  The Pensions Advisory Service will deliver the non-face to face guidance, while Citizens Advice will handle the face to face service.  What has that got to do with A4e?  Well, it's A4e which has the contract from MAS to do the face to face money advice, a fact which is still nowhere mentioned on the MAS website.  So what might have been a new source of work for A4e won't be.

The "no news" refers to the silence over the Slough fraud case.  If you need a reminder, there's this from the Daily Mail.  Five A4e employees were convicted of fraud early this year, having pleaded guilty to using forged paperwork to make false claims.  Sentencing was delayed, presumably until the trial of the remaining 8 accused, who were, we were told, due to go on trial in October.  I assumed that these ex-employees had pleaded not guilty, hence the delay.  Okay, there are two weeks of October still to go, but will we hear any more of this case?  I know it's small beer compared to the massive frauds by G4S and Serco, apparently forgiven by the government.  But we need to hear the full story.

Three more arrests

The BBC is reporting that three more people have been arrested by police in connection with the enquiry into alleged "fraud by misrepresentation" at A4e in Slough.  That brings the total arrested to eleven.  This investigation has been going on for nearly a year.

Plugging away

There's an interesting piece by Fiona MacTaggart MP on the Left Foot Forward website.  MacTaggart is the Labour MP for Slough, and a member of the Public Accounts Committee which tore into A4e recently.  She begins: "In politics often you plug away at an issue with no-one noticing, and then it becomes big news."  Yes, Fiona, I know the feeling.  She then says that over the last two years she has reported A4e to the National Auditor three times after complaints by constituents.  And it was in Slough that four former employees were arrested.  She outlines her concerns about the company:

• It cut its costs and provided a poor service
• It implied that it could offer skills training courses but failed to provide them
• It used unemployed people in unpaid roles in the company, and didn't give a job to any of them

We have a right, she says, to expect high standards from A4e in return for their high profits.

All true.   But something else worries me.  MacTaggart certainly isn't the only MP who has had complaints about A4e (and, I'm sure, about other providers).  There are a number of things MPs can do with such complaints.  They can i) ignore them; ii) pass them on to the relevant minister; iii) pass them to a civil servant in the relevant department or iv) pass them to the National Auditor because money is involved.  Whatever the various MPs did, the DWP would have been well aware of an accumulation of complaints; but nothing was done.  Undoubtedly, bland responses were given, assurances offered.  It's pure luck that MacTaggart was tenacious and well-placed.  Could we now see some other MPs coming forward with their own dossiers of complaints - and the replies they received?

Police investigation into A4e

The news couldn't be much worse for A4e.  The MailOnline, which has savaged Emma Harrison and A4e in the last few days, now reports that A4e iis at the centre of a fraud investigation.  "The Department for Work and Pensions confirmed last night that a probe into A4e – headed by Mrs Harrison – was under way.  A source at the company told The Mail on Sunday that on Friday afternoon, officers from Thames Valley Police visited the  company’s offices in Slough, Berkshire.  The source said they stayed for up to four hours and demanded staff hand over documents and computer files dating back two years."  Apparently what's being investigated is the allegation that "the company had put some  people in jobs for just one day, but claimed the funding nonetheless."




Anyone connected with the industry will be scratching their heads at this.  Under the 2006 contracts (I don't know about subsequent ones) it was perfectly possible to do this in certain circumstances.  A client gets a job, to start on Monday morning; so the provider fills in the paperwork on the Friday afternoon and sends it back to the Jobcentre, which signs the client off benefits.  The client turns up to work but decides at the end of the day that he doesn't want to do this and walks out.  This is still claimable as a job outcome if the employer signs that the job was intended to last for 13 weeks.  They won't get the other half of the money, which is payable only when the client has stayed in the job for 13 weeks.  If this is what's being investigated, then A4e will probably be in the clear.  But we'll wait and see.