Question to the HM Treasury:

To ask the Chancellor of the Exchequer, of the firms reported to HM Revenue and Customs for furlough fraud, how many (a) have been investigated and (b) remain to be investigated.

HMRC’s Fraud Reporting Gateway receives Human Intelligence reports on a variety of topics, including COVID-19 error and fraud, that are of interest to HMRC. This Fraud Reporting Gateway has resulted in 23,000 intelligence reports relating to the COVID schemes to assess, and a further 900 reports received from the Public Sector Fraud Authority.

Due to firewalls in place to protect human sources of information, the recipients of the intelligence do not know its origin. Therefore, once the intelligence is circulated, we are unable to directly identify and attribute yield generated from the Fraud Reporting Gateway contacts, or why an investigation was or was not started.