Nigel Willerton, head of the Tennis Integrity Unit, told a British parliamentary committee Wednesday that he would recommend that tennis’s anticorruption program have greater independence from the sport’s governing bodies in the future.
Willerton also said that there had been a “huge leap” since 2014 in the number of betting alerts, which are reports of suspicious activity forwarded to the integrity unit by betting companies.
Tennis is under scrutiny in the wake of reports that have raised concerns about the possibility of widespread match fixing, particularly at the sport’s lowest professional levels.
In response, tennis leaders announced at the Australian Open in January that they had commissioned an independent review of the anticorruption program, including the integrity unit, an internal monitoring group that was formed in 2008 and is now headed by Willerton, a former senior detective with the Metropolitan Police in London.