Seetec no evil…
Urgent questions are being asked at the DWP over a failure to investigate properly allegations of fraud by Seetec, which has various DWP contracts to help jobless people find work.
Officials assured two whistleblowers last autumn that the department would investigate claims that Seetec had been artificially inflating the number of jobs it was finding for its disabled clients through the Work Choice scheme – and pocketing the profits.
The 2 former Seetec employees claim that the company would offer work Choice clients as “free” labour to charities and other host organisations. Seetec would then pay their wages for the next six months while telling the DWP that the salaries were being paid by the host organisations. They alleged that Seetec profited from the scam because the amount it received from the DWP – thousands of pounds for every client who “completed” 6 months work – was far more than it paid the clients. (Seetec only had to pay for 20 hours a week at minimum wage to secure payment from the government for a successful outcome).
Three organisations the whistleblowers said were unwittingly used by Seetec in the scam have confirmed that they accepted disabled job-seekers as “volunteers”, even though it was made clear that there would be no jobs available at the end of the six months.
The DWP now says it has completed its “investigation” into the claims and that Seetec – which as the last Eye reported is the worst performing of the eight Work Choice contractors – has been exonerated of any wrongdoing. However, neither of the two whisteblowers was interviewed by DWP investigators, even though they offered to give evidence.
Asked how it could give Seetec a clean bill of health without gathering evidence, a DWP spokesman claimed there was no reason to interview the whistleblowers because they had supplied all the necessary information in emails In fact they had provided no detail at all. The email sent by one of the whistleblowers to the DWP last year (and passed to the Eye) includes only a 100-word summary of the allegations – just four sentences.
“As I understand it, the information they provided was investigated”, said the DWP spokesman. The investigators found there was “not fraud”, he said. Seetec itself declined to comment. But Margaret Hodge, the no-nonsense chair of the Commons public accounts committee, is now demanding answers from the DWP’s permanent secretary, Robert Devereux. Watch this space.
Source: Private Eye
