As local authorities cut back, nurseries already have their work cut out to continue to invest in enhanced facilities and improved learning environments for children.
Hitherto, cash businesses such as taxi firms and security companies have provided the main focus of worries over money laundering. Allegations that nurseries are being used as a front for money laundering by creating the fiction that children who do not exist are attending the nursery and that their fictitious parents are paying cash are not entirely new. But nursery owners have long been aware of the fact that their businesses are open to exploitation in this way.
The Care Commission, the regulator of nurseries and other organisations providing care in Scotland, is active in visiting nurseries to report on their performance. Part of the Care Commission's oversight role is to identify any existing or potential nursery operators who are involved, perhaps through connections to family members, with organised crime in the locality. Its brief is to ensure that only 'fit and proper' people are allowed to run nursery services.
One way for owners and managers to avoid any taint of suspicion is to ensure that all children attending nurseries are recorded and catalogued, with individual files for each child that contain a photograph and a record of their date of birth, address, weight and height. Attendance records, cross-checked against each individual file, will ensure that there is a traceable link between the payments made for care and the number of times the child attends the nursery.
A critical factor here is a payment record. Cash payments for care are not desirable. Best practice suggests that cheque payments, or credit or debit card payments, or better still, standing order payments, are to be preferred.
Nursery owners and managers have an obligation to put in place robust administrative and payment systems to show their businesses are beyond suspicion. Organised crime is a scourge on society and its involvement with such a sensitive and vital sector as nurseries needs to be stamped out decisively and quickly.
