Around half of the vacancies on the official job search website may be bogus, falsely promoted or against the rules, says Frank Field MP.{jcomments on}
A third of a million job vacancies advertised on the government's official website for jobseekers are suspected of being bogus, falsely promoted or against the rules, documents seen by the Guardian show.
Frank Field, a Labour MP and former minister, has established that officials are concerned about more than 350,000 vacancies promoted on the Universal Jobmatch site, which must be used by unemployed people to apply for jobs in order to claim benefits.
This amounts to around half of the jobs currently being advertised on the flagship website that Iain Duncan Smith, the work and pensions secretary, said would "revolutionise" the process of looking for work.
Field started asking questions about the website after discovering that some of his constituents had been scammed out of money by false employers, who asked for bank details upfront and cash for criminal record checks before disappearing.
He believes the whole website is "bedevilled with fraud" and "out of control", and is calling on Duncan Smith to "get a grip" on the contract, which is managed independently by a private recruiter called Monster.
Read the full story in the Guardian
