‘Champagne and forged signatures’
Former employee tells how jobless were asked to sign blank timesheets at back-to-work tsar’s firm
HOURS before Emma Harrison’s resignation as head of A4e, an ex-employee broke cover to paint a devastating picture of a company where corruption was ‘utterly rife’.
Tracie Spiers, 44, said staff members ‘routinely’ forged signatures on documents and champagne was handed out as an incentive to do well.
Several whistleblowers f rom around the country had already told the Mail about dubious practices at A4e while asking to retain their anonymity.
But Miss Spiers was prepared to be named.
The mother of two worked for the company in 2009 at its office in Slough, Berkshire – currently at the centre of police fraud inquiries.
She claimed jobless clients were asked to sign blank timesheets ‘every single Friday’, and that some of her colleagues wrote bogus sig- natures on forms to help them meet their targets.
A4e earned a £2,000 bounty from the Government for getting someone off the dole. Miss Spiers, from Twickenham, south-west London, said: ‘There was one colleague who used to forge signatures on the forms to pretend someone had got a job when they hadn’t. They would fake the signature of an “employer” for a job that didn’t exist. I was once asked to write one.
‘I was sitting at this person’s desk and they said, “Oh Trace, can you do this signature for me?” I’m left- handed. I couldn’t forge a signature if I tried. I refused, saying, “I’m not getting involved in this”. They found someone else to do it.’ Miss Spiers said one manager used to come into the office bearing a bottle of champagne in each hand as rewards for staff who had done well. ‘The bottles would be lined up in the office. It was an incentive to get more jobs put through the system.’
The unemployed were sent on A4e’s back-to-work courses as a condition of receiving their state benefits. The firm received government money for each person on its courses.
Miss Spiers said A4e advisers routinely faked timesheets to show someone had attended the course all week, even if they had not.
‘Filling in the timesheets was very time-consuming. Some of the client advisers would get people to sign blank sheets, and the adviser would fill them out later.
‘The managers were saying, “Just get them done, timesheets are money”. Each one was worth £400 to the company, and there were hundreds of them every week.
‘Some clients used to drift in and out and you just knew that they weren’t going to stay all week.
‘The client advisers were under such pressure. On Friday afternoon, you had 30 clients’ timesheets to complete and each one took about five to ten minutes. There was no way you could get them done properly in time, so we just had to make them up. It was much quicker to get somebody to sign a blank form and then fill it in later saying they had been in attendance all week, even if they hadn’t.’
Now unemployed, Miss Spiers said she had decided to expose the ‘hypocrisy’ of A4e’s claims that the alleged fraud was confined to a few individuals.
She left the firm in November 2009 and says she wrote to one of the managers alerting him to timesheets and ‘job outcomes’ being signed off falsely.
‘He replied saying they had carried out an internal investigation and had found my claims were unfounded,’ she said. ‘But it was utterly rife there.’
Asked about Miss Spiers’s claims, A4e said: ‘We cannot comment on these allegations during an ongoing police investigation.’