If you were in a restaurant and found that the waiter had charged you too much for your meal, you would probably think twice before dining there again.

If you later checked receipts and found the same restaurant had overcharged you every week for several years, you would probably call the police.

So why, then, has the government decided to allow G4S and Serco to resume bidding for public contracts – only months after these multinationals agreed to repay almost £200m to the taxpayer for work they never did.

And is it not about time that these companies were investigated by police forces rather than the Serious Fraud Office, a government department?

Today the Howard League for Penal Reform has published a dossier outlining years of failure by the two companies in delivering justice contracts.

The report, entitled Corporate Crime? A dossier on the failure of privatisation in the criminal justice system, was prompted by the tagging scandal, in which G4S and Serco invoiced the taxpayer for the monitoring of people who in fact had been returned to prison; for people who had left the country; for people who had never been monitored at all; and even for people who had died.

But the dossier also considers other major failings, not only by G4S and Serco but also by two other private firms who profit from the criminal justice system, Sodexo and GEOAmey.

Deeply concerning examples include how:

• a terminally-ill prisoner on his way to hospital was kept waiting in handcuffs for 40 minutes in the street, in full view of the public, while G4S staff went to a bakery for lunch
• Macmillan nurses were prevented, for contractual reasons, from entering a G4S prison to help an inmate dying of cancer
• unlawful restraint contributed to the death of a 14-year-old boy in a secure training centre run by Serco
• a Serco children’s prison became the most violent jail in England and Wales, accounting for one in 15 of assaults in the entire prison system
• a woman in a Sodexo prison was allegedly forced to clean her cell after miscarrying
• a woman was held for five years in solitary confinement in a Sodexo prison
• roads had to be dug up after a £900m GEOAmey contract involved the purchase of prison vans that were too big to get into court premises
• a GEOAmey prison van embarked on a 96-mile trip to drive a prisoner 50 yards because of a lack of suitable vehicles in the vicinity

Copies of the dossier will be sent to members of parliament on the public accounts committee, which heard evidence about the tagging scandal last November.

A shorter version, concentrating on the activities of G4S and Serco, will be handed to the Metropolitan police and the City of London police. I am asking these forces to use their resources and expertise to help the SFO with its complex investigation into these companies.

The Howard League is calling for G4S and Serco to be barred from bidding for government business until the fraud investigation is complete.

Public opinion is on our side: a poll published last week found that 63 per cent of respondents believed Serco should be banned from bidding, while 59 per cent said that the same should apply to G4S.

The sums of money involved in justice privatisation are beyond imagination and the complex contractual arrangements mean it is essential to ensure that there is a fiduciary standard of behaviour commensurate with delivering a public service. Decisions made by the current government now may tie the hands of future administrations wishing to hold the outsourcing companies to account.

The evidence points to misbehaviour that could be both deliberate and systematic at a corporate level.

I am asking the police to contribute to the investigation of what could be one of the biggest scandals of modern life.

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Frances Crook is chief executive of the Howard League for Penal Reform. She tweets @francescrook