That is not overcharging that is fraud send the directors to gaol. The fines need to be so high that they struggle to pay dividends or bonuses afterwards. It needs to be a deterrent to such behaviour. Also disqualify them from applying for government contracts for some years, call it a sanction.

Hanlon's razor

It many be incompetence but to bill for it is still fraud whether intentional or not. They charge loads of benefit claimants for fraud on the same basis.

Up until now they'd gotten away with it. G4S and the Olympics debacle somewhat turned the tide. Just wait until G4S properly fcuk up in policing and prisons...

Err no.

Fraud is a deliberate mis-representation.

But these invoices (deliberate act) are for the tagging of people who could be dead, abroad or in already in gaol, claiming that they have been tagged. So how is that not deliberate misrepresentation?

It could also be obtaining monies by deception which is itself a criminal act.

Of course the invoicing was deliberate - how do you accidentally write and send an invoice?

It is the mis-representation that has to be deliberate i.e. that there was an intent to deceive. That can happen two ways:

• either there was a deliberate decision to make a dodgy invoice or
• a dodgy invoice was made, it was found and then, expressly for the purpose of gaining monetary advantage, a decision made to deliberately do nothing about it

However, each of those is rather unlikely. Much more likely is the idea that, given the scale of the tagging programme, the ability of humans to be lazy or make errors, and the well-documented historical incompetence of Serco and G4S, a lot of buggered invoices were made and nobody really checked any of them.

Thusly, I refrain from ascribing to malice that which can be adequately explained by incompetence - Hanlon's Razor holds.

So even if you are generous to allow all of these mistakes to be allowed then where are the so called efficiencies from privatising the work? This is the sort of thing that private contractors are supposed to be doing better than public sector workers. Even the person processing the invoice would need a signature or worksheet for the records.

Now that is rather good question.

I can safely assert that, after having worked in all three sectors, efficiency is rather like the Loch Ness monster - oft mentioned and rarely seen.


Post-hoc auditing wouldn't be used in a large system like this - the number of audit records would be too large by several orders of magnitude

The individual transactions will be written in some massive database with a crappy Windows 2000 front end and the invoices generated automatically at month/quarter/year end. There will be little or no human interaction and no signature required - having access is authorisation