After the Lincolnshire County Council hired Fraser Perring to work as a social worker, in January 2011 he began an assignment on the East Lindsey family support and assessment team.
His nearly 19-month tenure with the team (which ended badly for both Perring and the council) involved elements of denial and allegations of dishonesty that have also been suggested in his Wall Street career.
On June 13, 2012, two Britons lodged a serious complaint against Perring: The aunt and uncle of a child whose care he was overseeing accused him of failing to properly notify them of the council’s intent to proceed with a closed adoption for their nephew. A closed adoption, which is now rarely performed in the United States or Europe, allows a birth family little contact with an adopted child’s new family; the practice is considered a “last resort” as a matter of British policy, according to a later investigation of Perring’s actions.
During the council’s investigation of the allegation, Perring insisted that he had followed all procedures, made three phone calls to the child’s relatives and sent them an April 17, 2012, letter that discussed the adoption recommendation. The investigators, however, concluded otherwise.
Records on the council’s server showed that the letter Perring claimed to have sent in April had been created on June 20, 2012. And phone records showed that Perring had not called the family from either his mobile or office phone.
During the investigation Perring appeared to not address the specific charges; he instead chose to decry what he called a toxic office culture and an excessively large caseload. He submitted his resignation on June 27, 2012.
But Perring did not leave his job empty-handed: After bringing a claim before the Nottingham Employment Tribunal, in July 2013 he secured from the council a 24,000-pound settlement, which did not admit his allegations of breach of contract and wrongful dismissal. Ghazan Mahmood, Perring’s lawyer in the proceedings, did not reply to an email seeking comment.
In February 2014 the Health and Care Professions Tribunal Service conducted disciplinary hearings on the matter and upheld the council’s findings. (Perring did not attend the hearings.) The tribunal service revoked his social worker license and designated him as “struck off.” The service is the adjudication arm of the Health and Care Professions Council, the United Kingdom’s primary licensing body for health care and social work professionals.
The tribunal service’s decision provided the following scathing indictment of Perring’s conduct before and after the episode: Perring’s “response shows that there is a complete denial of the serious issues that have been proven against him and that he has shown no insight whatsoever. Instead he sought to blame others, the management culture and has avoided dealing with the issues.”
Some six years later after financial journalist Gary Weiss called Perring a “scumbag” in a tweet about his social work career, on Jan. 20, 2018, Perring started publicizing his version of what happened in Lincolnshire County via 21 tweets: Perring framed the council’s handling of his case as retaliation against a “whistleblower” (Perring) — for his supposed calling out of “two senior employees” who had placed the child in an abusive environment that required the youngster’s removal. And he alleged that the council had intimidated witnesses and destroyed exculpatory documents he could have used in his defense. To top it off, Perring also claimed that he had been a victim of sexual harassment.
A call to the Lincolnshire County Council seeking comment about Perring’s latest allegations was not returned.