Forum Encourages Pre-Employment Screening

The Metropolitan police have launched a new fraud forum: PREFIT; Protecting Employers From Insider Threats. Launched at Scotland Yard, the forum brings together agencies such as SOCA, the Metropolitan Police and the National Fraud Authority (NFA) with industry. Private companies supporting the forum already include Kroll, KPMG and pre employment screening companies such as The Security Watchdog and First Advantage.

David Chernick, Chairman of PREFIT explains more:

Importance of Pre-employment Screening

The launch event saw a number of other speakers from a diverse range of stakeholders, including Rachael Tiffen, chief internal auditor and anti-fraud manager at the London Borough of Waltham Forest who highlighted the need for pre-employment screening with a number of alarming applications that the Borough had managed to reject. Waltham Forest have strict screening controls in place, which have even lead to prosecutions for crimes such as possessing fake passports and other legal documents.

Rachael was also able to share some alarming figures regarding agency staff sent to the Borough; 31% had no right to work in the UK, whilst 15% of candidates sent via recruitment agencies had committed housing benefit fraud.

On an even more dramatic level, Paul Evans from the Centre for the Protection of National Infrastructure (CPNI) talked about the need for a risk based approach to employee screening, citing examples of press journalists being able to access high profile jobs at the Palace as just one example of the threat to employers.

The need for vigilance was perhaps best summed up by David Hurst of CIFAS who quoted consultancy ControlRisks: “In a world of constantly changing threats, background screening is a first line of defense. Successfully implemented screening reduces the risk to a company from potentially fraudulent employees.”

Find Out More:

Please visit www.prefit.info for information on how you can get involved in the forum.

Full coverage of the launch event is available at www.info4security.com and we thank them for allowing us to use their video interview material.

You can find out more on how 192business aids employment screening on our recruitment compliance page.