Complaints about unscrupulous employers making unauthorised deductions from the wages of staff nearly doubled last year, new figures reveal.

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According to Citizens Advice, the trend in what it calls “wage theft” is particularly acute among casual workers such as cleaners and carers. It blames confusing working hours, poor administration and legal loopholes for the sharp rise in the number of people reporting that they are being underpaid. In some extreme cases, workers reported that they are not being paid at all.

The charity says its advice was sought in relation to 380,000 employment issues last year. Of these, more than one in six – 67,000 – related to pay and entitlements. Over the same period, the number of complaints about unauthorised deductions – the non-payment of wages owed – nearly doubled from 4,900 in 2014 to 9,000.

The figures, revealed in the charity’s latest Advice Trends publication, has triggered warnings that an increasing number of people are not being paid in full for the work they do.

“Bad business practices mean workers aren’t getting the pay they’ve worked hard for,” said Gillian Guy, chief executive of Citizens Advice. “Constantly changing shifts and confusion over working hours can lead to genuine mistakes where people aren’t always paid what they’re owed. At the same time, unscrupulous employers are misrepresenting people’s work and deliberately underpaying them, making it hard for people to prove that they’ve been shortchanged.”

The charity recognises that in some cases simple errors in recording the hours people worked have led to miscalculations in their pay and entitlements. However, it said that it was aware of many cases where employers had deliberately underpaid people, including taking money from their wages without good reason, misrepresenting their working hours, paying them below the national minimum wage and not paying them their wages for a long period of time or at all.

The findings are likely to raise further concerns that the lowest paid, who have little or no job protection, are not benefiting from the economy’s stuttering recovery.

“As more people are in casual and insecure work, it’s particularly concerning that there’s an emerging trend of pay errors and wage theft that can further undermine people’s financial security,” said Guy. “It is really important that employers take care to make sure people are paid the hours they have worked.”

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Citizens Advice highlighted the case of a cleaner who sought the charity’s help after going for months without proper pay. After her employer settled her back payments it then cut her wages to below the minimum wage without her knowledge.

Workers have also reported that their managers withheld information from staff in a bid to restrict their wages. Citizens Advice gave the example of a care worker who worked between 12 and 50 hours a week on a zero-hours contract and was regularly underpaid. She was prevented from accessing previous rotas so she could not prove how many hours she had worked.

“Many of the clients we see don’t work set hours and their employer doesn’t record their hours or work out their entitlements properly,” Tania Weber, an employment caseworker with Citizens Advice in Maidstone, Kent, told Advice Trends.

“People don’t get paid for all the hours they’ve worked, don’t get holiday pay, or don’t get paid at all. We’ve seen cases where employees who’ve asked for their wages get sacked, or where people have tried to pursue their employer and the business has simply gone insolvent without paying up.”