Guardian News and Media/London
The Serious Fraud Office has been called in by ministers to investigate the private security company G4S for overcharging tens of millions of pounds on electronic tagging contracts for offenders.
The Justice Secretary, Chris Grayling, said the overcharging included billing for tracking the movements of people who had moved abroad, those who had returned to prison and had their tags removed, and even people who had died.
Grayling told MPs he had made the decision after G4S on Wednesday refused to co-operate with a voluntary forensic audit of their billing practices and to withdraw as a potential bidder for the next generation of tagging contracts worth more than £1bn.
“At this time I do not have evidence of dishonesty by G4S but I have invited the Serious Fraud Office to investigate that,” he said.
Grayling told MPs that G4S and a second major supplier, Serco, had been overcharging on the existing £700mn contract, with the ministry of justice being billed for non-existent services going back to at least 2005 and possibly as long ago as 1999.
He said they included charging for monitoring people who were back in prison and had had their tags removed, people who had left the country, and those who had never been tagged in the first place.
“There are a small number of cases where charging continued for a period when the subject was known to have died,” he told the Commons.
“In some instances, charging continued for a period of many months and indeed years after active monitoring ceased. This is a wholly indefensible and unacceptable state of affairs. The house will share my astonishment that two of the government’s biggest suppliers would seek to charge in this way.”
The decision to call in the SFO follows an audit by PricewaterhouseCoopers who were commissioned by Grayling in May after billing discrepancies were discovered during a re-tendering process. Under the contracts, the movements of more than 20,000 offenders are monitored using electronic ankle tags at any one time.
