The government believes it paid up to 3.5 3.5 billion for erroneous or fraudulent claims for the Farlow project.

Jim Harara, HM’s top civilian employee at Revenue and Customs, said his staff calculated the probability that 10% of the money could go to the wrong place.

“We have taken an idea for the purpose of our plan that the rate of error and forgery in this project could be between 5% and 10%,” the permanent secretary said.

He was speaking in front of MPs in the Public Accounts Committee.

According to the latest figures, the government has so far paid .4 35.4 billion to Farooq. This means that somewhere between £ 1.75bn and £ 3.5bn can be misappropriated.

Hara added, “It will range from intentional fraud to error.”

“What we’ve said in our risk assessment is that we’re not going to try to find employers who have made legitimate mistakes in compiling their claims, because obviously it’s a new thing that everyone has had a hard time jumping into.”

“While we would expect employers to verify their claims and pay any extra amount … What we will focus on is tackling abuse and fraud.”

This is the first time HMRC has spoken publicly about the level of potential fraud that could be committed as part of a job retention scheme, which was up to 70% of an employee’s salary when they were in vain.

The government quickly implemented the huge scheme, which led many experts to say that a certain amount of fraud was inevitable.

Farloff is now coming down and is expected to do well next month. However, if the employees are working by the end of January, the employees returning from Farloo will receive an additional 1000 1,000.

Between 1 August, .6. Millions of people were pressured into government-backed furloughs, with 1.2 million workers demanding support.

Meanwhile, about 2.7 million self-employed people have demanded about 7. 7.8 billion from the government.

Harra said academic studies have estimated that the level of fraud and error could be as high as 10%.