As a London jury hears the case, the more useful lesson for HR may be how the alleged scheme came to light
For more than three years, prosecutors say, a London civil servant moved from one public-sector payroll to the next without ever leaving the last. At one point, jurors heard, his contracts added up to 183 hours a week. A week has 168.
What eventually exposed it, the court was told, was not a suspicious line manager or a run of missed deadlines. It was a government programme that cross-checks public-sector payrolls.
Kashim Chowdhury, 55, of Whitechapel in east London, went on trial at Southwark Crown Court on Tuesday. He denies nine counts of fraud and denies acting dishonestly or intending to make a dishonest gain, the BBC reported. The trial continues, and none of the allegations has been proven.
What prosecutors allege
Prosecutors say that between February 2020 and September 2023 he earned almost £350,000 from eight public employers. Those named in court include Tower Hamlets Council; the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs (Defra); the Department of Health and Social Care; the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA); the Department for Business and Trade; the Food Standards Agency; the Home Office; and an NHS trust in east London. By May 2023, prosecutors say, he was being paid for five full-time jobs simultaneously.
According to the prosecution, he misrepresented his existing employment when applying for each role and told employers he had to work from home to care for his mother, who he said was unwell. "Clearly, he would not have been employed by his employers if they had known he had multiple other full-time jobs," prosecutor Lucy Organ told the jury, the London Standard reported.
When the workload became too much, prosecutors say, he took sick leave from some jobs while carrying on in others. Jurors heard he was signed off with mixed anxiety and a depressive disorder but did not give the sick note to every employer.
The episode that has dominated coverage came in May 2023, when his UKHSA line manager, Aleesha Adams, set up a Microsoft Teams call about his absence. Prosecutors say he had applied white make-up to look ill and that Ms Adams saw it start to separate on his forehead. He also joined the call from a Defra email address, they say, and suggested it might be an old account. Ms Organ called the make-up incident "almost laughable" and told jurors the email explanation was a lie.
How it surfaced
For HR teams, the make-up is the least useful part of the story. The more instructive detail is that, according to the prosecution, the case began when the National Fraud Initiative alerted Defra.
The National Fraud Initiative (NFI) is a UK government data-matching programme run by the Public Sector Fraud Authority, which is moving from the Cabinet Office to the Department for Work and Pensions. It draws records from more than 1,100 organisations, including councils, police forces, hospitals and some private companies. Its main exercise runs every two years: participants upload data such as payroll files, and the system flags anomalies, such as one person drawing two full-time salaries. A match is a lead, not a finding. The employer still has to investigate.
The numbers are small but climbing. The NFI's latest national report, covering April 2022 to March 2024, recorded 38 employees in England who were dismissed or resigned after payroll matches, double the 19 in the previous two years. A separate pilot with 22 London borough councils and four staffing agencies, aimed at what the government calls "polygamous working", had led to 22 dismissals by mid-September 2024. Chris Keesing, chair of the London Borough Fraud Investigators Group, said in the report that the work had uncovered "half a million pounds in overpaid salary payments".
Most cases are far less dramatic than five jobs. In one described in the report, Barnsley Council found an employee on two 37-hour-a-week contracts with two local authorities for 10 months. The worker pleaded guilty to three counts of fraud and in June 2024 received a 12-month prison sentence, suspended for two years.
Read next: How many remote workers have two jobs?
A practice with its own vocabulary
In Britain's public sector it is "polygamous working"; in the US it usually goes by "overemployment", and it has fans. HRD has reported on a Reddit community of almost 200,000 users swapping tips on juggling jobs undetected. An AIResumeBuilder.com survey of 3,283 full-time US workers found that 64% of overemployed respondents use AI tools to manage the load.
Public employers elsewhere are not immune. In October 2025, the Saratoga County Sheriff's Office and New York's inspector general arrested Mehul Goswami, 39, a remote employee of the state Office of Information Technology Services. He was accused of working a second job in the town of Malta while on the clock for the state and stealing more than US$50,000, and was charged with second-degree grand larceny. State Inspector General Lucy Lang called the alleged conduct "an abuse of public resources, including taxpayer dollars".
Second jobs as such are common and usually legitimate. The US Bureau of Labor Statistics counted 8.4 million multiple jobholders in 2024, 5.2% of everyone employed, and HRD has reported that Australia had 963,100 multiple jobholders as of March 2025. The trouble starts with concealment and overlapping hours. In the UK, fraud-prevention service Cifas surveyed 2,000 employees at large companies in July 2025; 19% admitted secretly juggling two competing jobs, and 24% said it was justifiable.
Read next: Can I fire an employee for having a second job?
What HR can take from it
Prosecutors framed the case as someone exploiting pandemic-era home working, and that line will be quoted in plenty of return-to-office debates. Yet by the prosecution's own account, what exposed the alleged scheme was a records check. Office swipe-card data would have said little about a worker whose employers had each agreed he could stay home.
A few practical points follow. The first is to ask in writing at hiring. The prosecution's case rests on alleged false statements about existing employment, and an explicit declaration about current jobs, backed by a reference from the current employer, makes concealment harder and any later case cleaner. Employment lawyer Wendy Lazerson has told HRD that employers need well-drafted conflict-of-interest policies, while staying careful about workers' privacy rights.
The second is not to stop checking at onboarding. Cifas urges employers to keep running background checks throughout employment. In the UK, the NFI also offers some data services to private and non-public organisations.
The third is to watch absence patterns without jumping to conclusions. Repeated sick leave, slipping output and logins from unexpected accounts are worth a conversation. But an employee signed off with anxiety may simply be unwell, and in many jurisdictions working elsewhere during sick leave is not automatically misconduct. Investigate the facts before deciding what they mean.
The last is to write the policy before you need it. Separate a weekend side gig from a second full-time salary earned in the same hours, and spell out what must be disclosed and to whom.
Read next: Moonlighting: Is it a fireable offense?
Mr Chowdhury denies all the charges. The trial continues.
