At least 301 public sector employees have been caught secretly holding multiple jobs at the same time since 2016, according to the Cabinet Office's National Fraud Initiative, which also recovered £1.35 million in fraudulent salary payments over the same ten-year period.
The figure emerged after personnel data held by different government bodies was compared. It comes as 56-year-old Kashim Chowdhury was convicted of nine counts of fraud after exploiting post-Covid work-from-home culture to earn more than £28,000 of taxpayers' cash.
Nine jobs and 183-hour weeks
Chowdhury started working for Tower Hamlets Council in February 2022 and took a second job with Defra in April 2021 while going through the Government's vetting process. By September 2023, he had taken on nine different full-time positions with several government departments and public bodies, including the Home Office and the Department of Health and Social Care.
He had signed up for 183 hours of work a week — 15 more than there are in seven days, jurors were previously told. Between February 2020 and September 2023 he earned £350,000 from eight employers. He previously denied the charges.
Remote working and sick leave cover
Chowdhury kept the jobs under wraps using remote working and sick leave. In one case, he put on white makeup to appear ill during a video call with a manager. The roles eventually became "too much to cope with" and he was signed off from some roles due to "mixed anxiety and a depressive disorder", but remained off sick for some roles while working in others.
He accepted that he had failed to complete the application forms accurately but said: "I don't believe there was criminal intent." He claimed the jobs were a distraction from issues in his personal life, including his mother's health deteriorating. He said the job roles gave him a link to the outside world, despite working almost entirely remotely.
Call for tighter checks
William Yarwood, the campaigns director at the TaxPayers' Alliance, urged the Government to tighten public sector workers' employment checks. He said: "Public sector workers pocketing multiple full-time salaries is an outrageous abuse of taxpayers' money. The fact that hundreds have reportedly been caught doing so raises serious questions about government oversight. Ministers must urgently launch a crackdown, tighten employment checks and ensure anyone found deliberately gaming the system faces the sack."
The National Fraud Initiative is reportedly working to identify more employees who had been abusing the system in a similar way. They had previously identified 13 cases of polygamous working in 2024 to 2025.
A spokesman for the Department for Work and Pensions said: "The National Fraud Initiative continues to act as a key tool in protecting the taxpayer's hard-earned cash, with a recent pilot across local boroughs making almost £490,000 of savings."
The Civil Service had previously faced criticism over its failure to dismiss its underperforming employees. However, the workforce continues to expand. Last year, the Civil Service had more than 442,000 full-time employees on its payroll compared to 382,945 in 2021.
