COVID-19: 'Eye-watering' fraud levels in loans missed by government, says watchdog
Early warning signs of fraud, like more than 120,000 new companies being registered as the country went in to lockdown, were missed by the government, which still does not know the true extent of losses from the schemes.
There is an opportunity to be grasped here. If we have another pandemic, the ONS could put together a simple graph of the national fraud level as an indicator of how things are going compared to the Covid-19 pandemic.
It would be a really simple indicator which anyone should be able to understand. Once the graph goes past Peak Fraud we'll know the pandemic is ending and whether or not it was as severe as Covid-19.
4 comments:
I remember reading that lots of Poles had gone home because they'd received company loans and were keen never to have to pay them back. I don't suppose the Poles were alone in this.
Anyway, the Usual Suspects blamed Brexit for the exit of the Poles.
'In total, the number of new companies registered between 2020 and 2021 rose by more than 20% compared to any of the previous five years, something that "would certainly appear to be a warning sign warranting closer scrutiny", the watchdog said.'
Let's not be cynical here. The majority of those companies were probably making PPE and sanitiser. And filming the dancing nurses for TikTok.
But it does yield some hope that with the authorities so utterly inept, many of their plans will never come to fruition.
dearieme - I've seen a few stories like that too. It seems to have been so lucrative that there was never any intention to stay in the UK and pay back the loan.
Sam - and all those millions of Covid notices had to be made by someone.
Tammly - yes it is a reason to hope that much of it won't come to fruition. It still represents lost opportunities though.
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