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Medium-sized businesses could face a barrage of letters from HM Revenue and Customs as furlough closes at the end of this month and the government looks to recoup a suspected £7bn of fraudulent or erroneous Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (CJRS) claims. Business and financial adviser Grant Thornton said that HMRC's new Taxpayer Protection Taskforce was now up to full strength, following a recruitment drive to hire more than 1,200 investigators since March, and was now likely to move to stricter enforcement of furlough rules. A survey carried out earlier in the year for Grant Thornton of 605 businesses with annual turnovers of between £50m and £500m found that, of those surveyed who had made use of the scheme, just under a sixth (16%) had not reviewed their initial CJRS claims to check they were correct. In total, more than one million UK businesses have utilised the CJRS during the pandemic. It has safeguarded about 11.6 million jobs at a cost of just under £70bn, according to recent figures. However, the government estimates that up to 10% of that may have been claimed incorrectly, with fraud suspected to make up a significant proportion. Grant Thornton warned that the CJRS legislation indicated that any inaccuracy could be treated as deliberate and concealed. This was in contrast to penalties in most other tax regimes, whereby investigators would usually only judge something as deliberate in the face of compelling evidence.