The recruitment industry has joined forces with the Metropolitan Police to launch a counter-fraud forum in a bid to protect jobseekers, employers and recruitment agencies from fraud.
The forum, known as SAFER (Safe Advice for Employment and Recruitment), is a non-profit-making, industry-wide forum, whose members include Kelly Services, Manpower, Reed and Impellam together with trade associations including the Recruitment Employment Confederation.
"SAFER provides a forum for the sharing of information and best practice among the industry in order to identify and design out the threats as well as assess where fraudsters could go next," Stephen Brewis, chairman of SAFER, said. "By acting as the forward ears, eyes and radar for all fraud within their sector, the forum will quickly pass on intelligence to other sector forums that could be at risk, as well as law enforcement agencies."
Examples of fraud in the recruitment sector can range from providing a false CV to using a false identity to obtain state benefits while working and from infiltrating employers for criminal purposes to duping online boards with bogus jobs.
The forum has established a publicly accessible website to raise awareness of fraud, Brewis said. “We're looking at gathering case studies of fraud to put up on the website. Our vision of SAFER is that all aspects of the recruitment industry will co-operate with each other to help safeguard stakeholders such as employers, candidates and agencies.”
Speaking at the launch, Rachael Tiffen, chief internal auditor for the London Borough of Waltham Forest, outlined the importance of pre-employment screening of prospective job seekers. "We check where candidates live, their employment and education history and use open source information. We check everyone from the director of finance to caretakers and cleaners." Using the council's pre-employment screening process, there were nine arrests and convictions for fraud in 2007, she added.
Nigel Evans MP, chairman of the All Party Parliamentary Group on Identity Fraud, also gave his backing to the launch of SAFER. “We know how vast ID fraud is,” he said. “The strength of any business is its employees and if agencies work together, then you can tackle the problem right at the beginning. Employers have huge responsibility to check that people are who they say they are and that the organisation is properly protected.”