Ignoring whistleblowers has cost the taxpayer hundreds of millions of pounds, new analysis has found, with the cost of three recent scandals alone pegged at 426m.
A report published today by the whistleblowing charity Protect has laid bare the cost of failing to act when whistleblowers speak up.
It looked at three major scandals in recent years: the Post Office IT Horizon scandal; the Lucy Letby scandal; and the 2018 collapse of the oursourcing giant Carillion.
It calculated the costs associated with the Carillion scandal – in which the UK’s second-largest construction company was plunged into compulsory liquidation in January 2018, despite the Cabinet Office having no indication it was not in sound financial health six months earlier – at 209m. Carillion held around 420 public sector contracts when it went under.
The report notes that warnings about improper accounting practices from a member of staff, Emma Mercer, had little effect. Her repeated warnings were ignored, except for the company’s auditors, KPMG, being told to re-audit its own work, “effectively marking [its] own homework”. And when Mercer became Carillion’s finance director in September 2017 – having raised concerns about its finances in spring that year – the company’s “fate as a soon-to-be ex-construction giant had already been sealed”, the report says.
A select committee report into the collapse found Carillion’s board and executive members were “uninterested in hearing inconvenient truths about the...
From misinformation around Indian Air Force aircraft crash in Rajasthan’s Churu to false claims of the UAE offering lifetime residency through a Golden Visa for just Dh100,000 for Indian citizens,...