Coronavirus: up to £ 3.5bn in cash without permission stolen or mistakenly paid – HMRC

Up to £ 3.5 billion in payments from the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme may have been fraudulently claimed or paid in error, the government has said.

HM Revenue and Custom told MPs at the Public Accounts Committee that it estimates that between 5% and 10% of the license cash has been incorrectly paid.

The latest data shows that the government has so far paid 35.4 billion pounds through the scheme.

The plan has paid 80% of the salaries of licensed workers since March, up to a maximum of £ 2,500 a month.

“We have made an assumption for the purposes of our planning that the error and fraud rate in this scheme could be between 5% and 10%,” HMRC Permanent Secretary Jim Harra told deputies Monday.

“That will range from deliberate fraud to error.”

The Public Accounts Committee estimates that a total of £ 30 billion in tax was lost in 2019 due to taxpayer errors and fraud.

Both HM Treasury and HMRC were ordered to appear before MPs to explain how they intended to reduce the problem.

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“What we have said in our risk assessment is that we are not going to try to find employers who have made legitimate mistakes in compiling their claims, because obviously this is something new that everyone had to deal with in a very difficult way.” Mr. Harra said.

“While we expect employers to verify their claims and reimburse any excess amounts, we will focus on addressing abuse and fraud.”

So far, 8,000 calls have been received to the HMRC fraud hotline. The HMRC is now investigating 27,000 “high-risk” cases in which they believe a serious error has been made in the amount an employer has claimed, he added.

Mr. Harra cautioned that any employee who feels that their employer may have been fraudulently claiming leave money can report it to the HMRC by completing a form on their website.

“While we cannot get involved in any relationship between the employee and the employer, we certainly can claim any subsidies to which the employer is not entitled, including subsidies that they have not transferred in wages to their employees.”

License fraud warning

This is the first time that the HMRC has spoken publicly about possible fraud affecting the Coronavirus Job Retention Plan.

In July, the center-right think tank Policy Exchange warned that fraud and error could cost the government between 1.3 and 7.9 billion pounds.

The think tank said the government’s financial rescue plan was vulnerable to scams due to the size of the packages and the speed at which measures were rushed to save individuals and businesses from economic ruin.

The calculation is based on projected fraud rates for government spending by the Cabinet Office and the Department of Work and Pensions.

The report said that the real value lost to fraud may be closer to the upper end of the estimate “due to the higher-than-usual levels of fraud that accompany disaster management.”

It read: “This is a serious waste of public finances and a post-event guarantee with adequate resources will be required to assure the public that all possible steps have been taken to reduce this level of fraud.”

At the time, a government spokesman said he was engaged in “extensive post-payment reviews of stimulus and support payments, to find fraud and recover money for the taxpayer.”