Payroll fraud costs UK firms £12bn per year

14 June 2016

Businesses in the private sector are losing a total of £144bn a year through fraud, with £12bn being lost through payroll fraud alone.

HRreview has reported that the Annual Fraud Indicator 2016 found the annual total cost of fraud in the UK stands at £193bn per year, £12bn of which is due to payroll fraud.

The Annual Fraud Indicator 2016, conducted by the UK Fraud Costs Measurement Committee with Experian, PKF Littlejohn and the University of Portsmouth’s Centre for Counter Fraud Studies, found the annual total cost of fraud in the UK stands at £193bn per year.

Gary Webb, of the Bond Payroll Services, noted that any business can be prone to fraud. “Payroll fraud goes on quite regularly in businesses without them knowing about it. There is high and low-level fraud going on. Low level [fraud] is things like adding on a few miles onto an expenses claim. Then there are people who are genuinely out to defraud a company, such as the ghost employee level [i.e. the number of people on the payroll who don’t actually work for the company in question] – where people involved in the payroll process actively seek to defraud a company.”

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