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There’s been a gradual shift in the way we’re all thinking about taking a gap year or a sabbatical from work. Gone are the days of spending the year backpacking around South East Asia, taking jobs in bars or shops to fund the next leg of the trip. Young people – and older people on a career break – are nowadays more interested in doing something worthwhile with their time away from the UK.

Gone are the days where it was almost impossible to find out what sort of information official bodies held about us. Data Protection legislation, which has recently been superseded by the GDPR, allows us to request that companies send us the information which is held about us in paper records or on computer, and also gives us the right to have any mistakes on that information corrected.

There’s no getting around having a DBS check when you are applying for certain professions. The list of jobs and situations in which applicants need a DBS is set down in law by the government, and so employers are not free to decide who has a DBS check and who doesn’t. A DBS check looks into your criminal record, and lists convictions and cautions which are on the Police computer.

The figures are startling – around £40 million lost each year by UK businesses due to fraud by employees. Fraud within organisations takes many forms, from the simplest type of fraud whereby someone just steals cash from their workplace, to more complex types of fraud where the employee manipulates accounts of their friends or family. Tracking down fraud can be tricky, but there are certain “red flags” which might indicate there’s something going on to worry about.

In an ideal world, the process of getting your DBS check would always run very smoothly. Usually, DBS checks are issued within around two weeks of them being requested, but statistics repeatedly show that some areas are consistently failing to issue certificates within this timescale.

Whatever the size of your business, any manager will know that it’s almost impossible to keep on top of everything. It’s often the simple processes which are the most time-consuming, and among the most complex are recruitment. Making sure you’re getting the right person for a vacancy is a crucial decision and requires the investment of time and energy in placing adverts, screening CVs, conducting interviews and then training up a new employee.

It’s hardly surprising that there’s a lot of confusion about checks performed by the Police into your background. For a start, the body which we all knew as the Criminal Record Bureau (CRB) changed a few years ago into another body called the Disclosure and Barring Service (DBS).

Thousands of British people move overseas every year to work, either temporarily or permanently. Young people taking a gap year either before or after Uni, people who are relocating to another country with an existing employer, or those breaking away from the UK completely to build a new life elsewhere. Anyone who has made the move to a new country will know just how much paperwork there is to get through when you’re trying to organise the practicalities of renting a property or opening a bank account.

It sounds like the perfect part time job for a music or sports fan – working as a steward at a local venue and getting to see concerts, plays and football matches free of charge. While it’s true that working as a steward might allow you to get into events and be paid for being there, it’s often hard work and there are certain requirements to get the job in the first place.

The DBS system hit the headlines again at the end of May 2018 when a report issued by the government’s Public Accounts Committee revealed that an upgrade to modernise the way in which the Disclosure and Barring Service works is running four years late and has exceeded its budget by £229 million.