Do health & safety duties in the workplace pave the way for failure to prevent fraud? Tom McNeill sets out the possible routes ahead
- Much like workplace health and safety legislation, under the proposed failure to prevent fraud offence the burden will be on the organisation to prove the reasonableness of its procedures.
- Punishing organisations for wrongdoing which they may be able to do little to prevent will arguably do little to deter crime.
At some point and in some form, we are likely to have a new failure to prevent (FTP) fraud offence, it having been shoehorned into the Economic Crime and Corporate Transparency Bill, currently in the House of Lords. While FTP fraud has been long debated, there remain significant criticisms, not least that it risks organisations being punished for conduct which was not their own and which they could not have prevented; and that it may do little to prevent fraud and potentially have the opposite effect. This is not to mention the increased bureaucratic and costs burdens on businesses
