Businesses reported more than £40m in losses from employee fraud

Businesses reported more than £40m in losses from employee fraud last year, new statistics have revealed The data also showed that employers reported more than 800 incidences of frauds from inside their organisation in 2016-17. Employee frauds include falsifying claims for travel and subsistence, creating bogus customer records or simply stealing cash.

Apparently, the figures are likely just the “tip of the iceberg”, because much of employee fraud goes unnoticed.

The most serious and damaging employee frauds are often committed by longstanding senior employees who abuse their position of trust in the business and treat the company’s cash as their own. Such frauds are often extensive and can run into hundreds of thousands of pounds. Research revealed that almost half of insider frauds were uncovered by internal controls and auditing, while a fifth were stopped just in time, by line managers or whistleblowing.

According to Office for National Statistics data published in July, fraud accounted for 3.4 million – or roughly 31% – of the 11 million crimes reported in the UK in the year to March 2017.