Recruiters who continually submit staff who fail screening at a London borough are being removed from its preferred suppliers list.

Speaking at the launch of PREFIT (Protecting Employers from Insider Threats) Rachael Tiffen, chief internal auditor and anti fraud officer, at the London Borough of Waltham Forest, said that some agencies declined to submit candidates because they knew there was a good chance that they would fail the screening process.

“The biggest number of those who fail our screening are agency staff,” Tiffen told HR, security and vetting professionals at the PREFIT launch in London.

Of the agency staff who failed Waltham Forest’s screening process in 2008, Recruiter can exclusively reveal:

• 23% had made inappropriate claims for benefits
• 31% had no right to work in the UK — with forged stamps/visa in passports being common
• 8% had unspent convictions for theft and false accounting
• 23% had ‘contrived employment’ records Housing fraud was an issue in 15% of cases

Tiffen said that recruiters who continually submitted staff who failed the screening process are taken off the borough’s preferred suppliers list.

Neutral vendor company Comensura, who works with Waltham Forest, carries out some checks on candidates before the borough’s more exhaustive check.

This includes checks on ID, where candidates live, eligibility to work in the UK, and work and qualifications history.

Former head of Reed’s screening business and chairman of PREFIT, David Chernick, told Recruiter: “Organisations wrongly assume that temps
and contractors are lower risk than employees because they are not there as long, and that therefore they don’t need to do the same checks as for their own employees, but people who are employees are more likely to be more loyal than temporary workers.”

Chernick said the problem was that while some agencies screen staff better than employers screen their employees, for example by having dedicated teams separate from consultants, “unfortunately some agencies don’t have the capacity to do it”.

Chernick said it was important for recruiters to have a screening policy in place, but it was more important still that this was part of the culture of the company. Chernick said the current economic environment made it harder for recruiters to carry out screening. “If you are only getting 50% of the fee that you used to get, it’s really difficult because you still have to pay someone to carry out the checks.

“Recruiters are so desperate to get people into feegenerating employment, is it any wonder that some unscrupulous agencies are failing to do the checks?”