Flexible hours, but pay and compensation are inadequate - Anonymous employee Serve Legal Employee Review

First of all the pay, on average you will be payed ~£4.99 per audit (it costs companies £80-35 to commision an audit), whilst this may sound good for 15 mins in a store buying a age restricted product, you have to account the planning for each audit (reading the questions they will ask you afterwards, reading the brief (get onto this later) and then also plan the route), then driving to the location (they do repay for mileage but doesn't compensate time) and then writing the report up afterwards. Overall for 26 pounds worth of work you potentially have spent >4 hours to do it. Well below the national minimum wage for over 18yr olds - they tell companies they are a "ethical employer" with "fair pay". Whilst traveling time between audits may not be an issue for auditors living in cities e.g a 2 min walk or a 5 min drive, for auditors living in rural areas quite often audits are 20 mins away from each other by car significantly reducing the pay per hour, and the pay for rural areas aren't increased accordingly. Whilst some audits are simpler - eg just noting down the servers description and buying a age restricted product, for the same pay sometimes you are required to return the item (takes much longer), look out for signs in the premises, note the cleanliness of the store, speak to management, write letters, report on staff uniform, all of this takes up so much brain space and ppl often forget stuff, and it takes so much more time to complete the audit but you are paid the same. Serve legal on two occasions have now tried not to pay me for audits, for one a local store didn't have a knife, so as stated in the briefing document I bought a listed bladed article - which I was ID'd for so it was a pass. But when I submitted it the area manager told me it was rejected and I wouldn't be paid for it as I didn't speak to a member off staff to confirm they didn't have any (eithen though i had a photo of the empty shelf) whilst it didn't say this needed to happen in the briending document. They then said I couldn't re-do it, - I was later re-asigned the same audit where staff confirmed they didn't have a knife and I purchases the same bladed article with the same outcome. Another time was a click and collect audit whereby they were telling me that I had to buy 25 pounds worth of alcohol from a shop online, but they would only pay for 20 pounds of it, as the rest was coming from the 4.99 of pay I was receiving for doing it, I said is this right and they said that it was because I was getting free alcohol, in their defence they did allow me to only purchase 20 pounds worth of stuff thus allowing me to actually be paid for the audit.