One day we were approached by a large cleaning company that was contracted to clean numerous hospitals throughout the country. Managers in one of the hospitals were quite suspicious of the actions of some of their employees. Although all of the workers seemed to have ’swiped in and out’ with their ID cards on the times that they were allocated to work, there was a lack of staff and in particular the amount of cleaning that was being done.  As it was a very large hospital, when workers were sent out to clean it was hard to find them again until they returned to ’swipe out’ to leave for home. Naturally the managers were suspicious that the employees were working together to cover each others backs, allowing each other to leave work without the manager’s consent and ’swiping’ each others ID cards to make it look like the employee was still in the building when they were actually at home for several hours while getting paid for work they were not doing.

The company employed us to go on undercover surveillance and find out what was going on behind the scenes. Our first actions were to send one of our agents in as a supervisor to spy on employees. This proved quite difficult as a majority of the workers were of many different nationalities and would speak to each other in different languages. It was also hard for our agent to ’mingle’ with the workers as he was a newcomer and they did not know how much they could trust him. Our agent followed numerous employees sneaking out and going to pubs and bookmakers. After a month working undercover and using different equipment including advanced voice recording equipment we captured the evidence the company needed to take down the fraudulent employees who were, as first thought, covering for each other while taking full days off. Not only that but another one of the supervisors was in on the act and was allowing this to happen. This supervisor was turning a blind eye towards this fraud. In fact if a cleaner wanted the day off he would demand £15 to keep quite and allow the employee to go.  

Our agent said it was a tough job, mostly due to the fact that he had to try and keep employees in line whilst trying to watch certain individuals that did not trust him. One nasty cleaner even threw rubbish from a bin in the ladies toilets in his face on the last day of the job. He said it was the nicest way they could say thank you and good bye.