As always the devil is in the details....

If we ever need reminding why we must always consider the ethical obligations under which we operate as small and medium enterprises a salutary lesson comes in the form of the recent news that workers at the publically embarrassed company Autofocus Ltd will now be the subject of contempt of court hearings. Allegations have been sent to the Attorney General regarding the conduct and evidence during the previous case with Accident Exchange.

Autofocus was used by insurance companies to investigate the cost of replacements hire cars in claims involving the victims of motor accidents. It’s evidence which involved the testing of rates charged by credit hire companies to establish whether a bill was put forward in thousands of court cases.

The calls promised by autofocus were not being made to establish a fair rate for the hire of vehicles and fictitious rates were inserted into previously prepared reports

Now we can all see the flaw here, that the company being contracted rather than providing the service which it said it was providing, just provided something that gave the appearance of the contracted product. Now the issue here is that it is not difficult to imagine that with two identical claims in the same time period that the circumstances and the pricing will be the same and the same comparison numbers could have been provided, without causing the client any harm at all. The same sets of comparison could have been reused several times, reducing the cost incurred and increasing the speed of response, neither event a particular issue more of a positive result really.

However this sort of behaviour is the start of the rot as it were, Autofocus had obligated themselves to do the work, and Accident Exchange had a reasonable expectation to receive the figures that they had asked to be gathered. Autofocus had no idea whether any duplicated or derived figures would be sufficient and couldn’t without returning to the brief and doing the job as described.

The lesson to take away from this is that you should always review any processes that you have, for compliance with any contracted or legal requirements on a regular basis.
The examples above occurred over a 4 year period so the problems could have been addressed much earlier, prior to where Accident Exchange were so considerably exposed.

Estimates show that a potential of 20,000 compensation cases could be affected Accident Exchange suggest that £50million pounds of additional costs could have been incurred.