VAT non payment
I would have thought that not paying HMRC the difference between input and output VAT would come under defrauding HMRC and not the NHS
A former senior IT manager has pleaded guilty to defrauding the UK’s National Health Service of £800,000 over seven years. Barry David Stannard, a 53-year-old from Chelmsford, Essex, admitted to four offences at Chelmsford Crown Court, including two charges of fraud by false representation and two charges of cheating the …
I am surprised HMRC didn't pick up on the VAT fraud straight away. All they had to do was match up the supplier's VAT returns with the NHS trust's. I assume this happens automatically as they seem to know how much you owe them and therefore don't understand why it wasn't flagged immediately. Defrauding your employer is one thing, but attempting to pull one over on the tax man who literally has your books right under their nose is monumentally stupid.
> Not sure how payroll records helped here
I took it to mean that the auditors had checked bank account numbers on the payroll with bank account numbers of suppliers. An obvious check and you would have thought he'd known that - but never underestimate how greed blinds people to the obvious.
I hope he gets a substantial prison sentence.
But going through finance vetting just to buy (eg) lunch on a business trip is a chore, so in a lot of places, managers are able to spend a certain amount at their discretion. This guy made sure that all of the invoices he submitted from his own company were within his discretionary spending limit.
Another way to play this (that might have been harder to detect), would have been for him to sell via Amazon's 'Marketplace' or similar. That way the invoices would come from Amazon. Of course, then he'd have had to find a way to make sure other people didn't try to buy his, presumably non-existent, products via Amazon.
I wonder if he was originally found out from not paying VAT. That's pretty easy to link between payer and payee, and once they started investigating and found out the guy signing for the invoices was the owner of the companies being paid it probably didn't take long to figure out the rest.
I'll bet he started out small and when he wasn't caught after the first few years went for more and more money until the VAT non payment became large enough to be noticed.