It is estimated that sick days cost the UK economy £13 billion per year and one out of eight absences is not genuine. This has led to some companies outsourcing their absence management, using nurses to field calls and expose fake sickness.

The new idea is to take this one step further, and use lie detectors to tell when employees are calling in with false sickness claims. The Voice Risk Analysis (VRA) system works by picking up changes in a caller’s voice before making thousands of calculations and then alerting the person taking the call. The VRA system has been trialled successfully at Harrow Borough Council to detect false benefit claims, and it is thought it would be a useful tool in reducing bogus sickness.

However it has also been highlighted recently that 67% of workers are too scared to call in sick; two in three Britons go to work while they are ill because they worry what their boss will think if they phoned in sick. This can sometimes cause more of a problem; damaging morale and other people’s health.

So, will the introduction of lie detectors expose bogus sickness and save money? Or will it have a detrimental effect making genuinely ill staff so nervous to make that call, that they soldier on at work unproductively and risk other employees’ wellbeing?

I think introducing lie detectors could take things a ‘Big Brother’ step too far - I would be interested to hear your thoughts.