Eat Out to Help Out Fraud

Although the worst days of the pandemic and the easing of the first lockdown seems a long time ago the Treasury have long memories and takes fraud at any time very seriously.

The Treasury and HMRC are very keen to recover monies issued in error or on the basis of fraudulent claims and have had the benefit of a 1250 taskforce working on recoupment and prosecution. The Taxpayer Protection Taskforce, set up to recoup billions fraudulently taken from COVID-19 support schemes has now been disbanded  

However, speaking at the Treasury Committee on Wednesday, HMRC chief executive Jim Harra said £4.5bn was lost to fraud in the furlough, self-employed support, and Eat Out to Help Out schemes.

He stated Eat Out to Help Out, had a particularly high level of fraud of around 9%, higher than any other scheme and "much higher" than would normally be expected in the tax regime generally, He confirmed that applications under the scheme would still be subject to scrutiny and commented that-

As part of efforts to clamp down on fraud, arrests were made, which in turn resulted in "quite a few voluntary disclosures" from restaurants who volunteered that they'd made a mistake in their claim and repaid,

"I'm aware of one case where a restaurant claimed to have a record month in sales during Eat Out to Help Out at the same time as they were claiming to have furloughed all of their staff,"

"You'd be surprised at what people think we won't join up."

Honesty is always the best policy so disclosure now of errors from that time may save a lot of pain in the future