Fraud Prevention and Staff Accountability

The policy applies to all recording of service-user money and care-unit petty cash within CareLedgerPro, and to all accounts on a provider's tenancy regardless of role. It supports the provider's own financial-abuse and safeguarding policies; it does not replace them.

Relevant to Care Act 2014 safeguarding duties, the Mental Capacity Act 2005 where a service user does not manage their own money, CQC quality statements on safeguarding and governance, and the Fraud Act 2006.

Everyone with an account is accountable for the entries made under it. In practice:

• Accounts are personal. Sharing credentials, or recording a transaction under another person's account, is a disciplinary matter for the provider and undermines every control on this page.
• Two-factor authentication is mandatory for all roles, so an entry attributed to a member of staff was made by someone holding both their password and their enrolled device.
• Entries are recorded contemporaneously and reflect what actually happened, including the correct funding source.
• Mistakes are corrected openly through the correction or void routes with an honest reason, not by re-entering data to obscure the original.
• Every view of a client or transaction record is logged, so browsing records outside an assigned group is visible to administrators.
• Concerns about another person's handling of service-user money are raised under the provider's safeguarding and whistleblowing procedures, not resolved informally in the ledger.

Managers are expected to review flagged transactions and missing receipts at least weekly, complete and sign off cash reconciliation for each care unit weekly, and review spending-plan breaches when raised. Administrators review the user audit log — role changes, deactivations, 2FA resets — at least monthly.

The daily digest email lists outstanding receipts, flagged entries, unreconciled units and plan breaches so that review is prompted rather than relying on someone remembering to look.

1. Preserve the record. Do not void or correct entries under investigation; the history is evidence and is append-only for that reason.
2. Restrict access. An administrator can deactivate the account or remove group assignments immediately; the change is recorded with the acting administrator's identity.
3. Export the evidence: the transaction history, receipts, signatures, audit log and data-access log for the affected service user and period.
4. Escalate under the provider's safeguarding policy — local authority safeguarding, the police where a criminal offence is suspected, and the CQC where notification is required.
5. If personal data has also been exposed, raise a record in the built-in breach register so the 72-hour ICO assessment clock is tracked.

These are recording and detection controls, not a guarantee against fraud. The platform cannot verify that a purchase actually took place, that a receipt belongs to the transaction it was attached to, or that cash counted at reconciliation was counted honestly. It cannot detect collusion between staff who countersign for one another, and it does not perform automated behavioural profiling of staff.

What it does is make every entry attributable, make alteration visible rather than silent, and put the discrepancies in front of a manager quickly. Recruitment checks, supervision, rota-level segregation of duties and acting on what the reports show remain the provider's responsibility.