Outsourcing giant Serco committed fraud on a mass scale – and yet it's still propping up the state

The best of Voices delivered to your inbox every week - from controversial columns to expert analysis Sign up for our free weekly Voices newsletter for expert opinion and columns Sign up to our free weekly Voices newsletter SIGN UP I would like to be emailed about offers, events and updates from The Independent. Read our privacy policy Let’s say you run a small plumbing firm and you’ve been charging your local council for fixing 100 toilets a month when you have in fact fixed 80. After all, it’s just “taken responsibility” for three counts of fraud and two of false accounting between 2010 and 2013 relating to its electronic tagging contract with the Ministry of Justice which created a storm of controversy when it emerged that we taxpayers had been charged for the monitoring of people who were dead. Serco also now gets to play the contrite card, and ensure that the flow of government work continues uninterrupted CEO Rupert Soames, who was appointed after the offences took place, said he and his team were “mortified, embarrassed and angry” at what went on while touting how the company had “worked extremely hard to regain the trust and confidence of government”. Said government knows that if Serco were to be told it’s toast and there will be no more work for it, like our plumber’s business, things could easily get messy.