The latest figures published by the International Confederation of Private Employment Agencies (CIETT) pegs the UK’s temporary workforce at around 1.2 million or approximately 5% of the UK’s total workforce. You can download the full CIETT report here.

These figures, published last year, are for 2008. Back then over at Stoy Hayward, forensic accounting expert and now a senior partner, Simon Bevan identified that spiralling personal debt as a result of mortgage, food and fuel price hikes was making workers desperate.

Now where are we three years on? How desperate are workers as austerity packages, the VAT increase and seemingly runaway inflation bite hard?

With redundancy releasing hundreds of thousands to swell the books of employment agencies with both white and blue collar workers, to what desperate measures are workers resorting in an effort to raise income levels?

Much fraud is committed by permanent staff and vetting is a good way of discovering those with records for dishonesty. In the world of temporary work, vetting is not a suitable route because of factors such as cost or the transient nature of the workforce.

Paper timesheets can be a fraudster’s paradise. Any system that gives temporary workers the opportunity to manipulate the base statistics that are used to calculate pay represents a point of temptation, especially during an economic downturn.

The best thing to do is remove manual paper-based timesheet systems from temp agency workflows. As well as eliminating opportunities for timesheet fraud it brings efficiency that impacts performance across the agency.

We’ll be developing the theme of fraud on the blog from time to time, so why not stay tuned by subscribing?

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