IT manager who swindled Essex hospital trust out of £800k gets 5 years in prison An IT manager who defrauded an Essex hospital trust out of more than £800,000 using two fake companies set up to commit his crimes has been jailed – after a court heard that he had previous convictions for dishonesty. Barry Stannard, a 53-year-old IT manager from Chelmsford, will spend at least two years and eight months in …
That's unfair. The vast majority of McD staff are not performing any form of community payback during or after their sentence.
A large number of "criminals" provide payback through work at charity shops - but in all cases this is know to the organisation up front due to the blanket DBS checks in place.
For Barry the only way forward will running his own business.
What's missing from the sentence is the bit about paying back the money owed to the public purse.
More likely to be seen acquiring skills with Timpson’s rehabilitation courses for prisoners.
My understanding of POCA is that they will take the house regardless of ownership if they determine that this was paid for, or improved, as a benefit of his crime. If he fails to cough up then he can be repeatedly incarcerated for anything up to an additional 14 years.
"Only if he had donated a healthy cut of the loot " If you think those cuts are healthy I can only imaging your are the treasurer of the tory party and think all the long row of 0s is all that is needed, ignoring the fact there was a decimal point a couple of miles to the left.
The really terrifying thing about the tories is they nor only seem to be corrupt they seem to be utterly innumerate as well.They're not selling democracy they're practically giving it away,
"Only if he had donated a healthy cut of the loot to the Tory Party"
How short some people's memories are. Tony Bliar wanted to dissolve the House of Lords when it looked like they might block some of his attempts to screw over the public but then he passed the Parliament Act (you know, the one that allowed him to tell the HoL to go f*** themselves if they tried to block anything he wanted to do) and started handing out peerages to his cronies - and suddenly they were the greatest thing since sliced bread, all threats to dissolve the institution or reduce their power suddenly disappeared and Bliar managed to get himself made UN Special Envoy to the Middle East (remind me, who sent "our boys" into Iraq looking for non-existent "weapons of mass destruction"?)
Just because Labour claim to represent the working class and look out for those who keep the economy - and the country - going, does not make it true. You might want to reflect on the origin of - and current presence in Parliament of - "Champagne Socialists".
You might also want to think about how much a QC or "human rights" barrister earns compared to how much a Nurse or retail worker earns before you pretend the other MPs are any better.
"How can anyone think they're going to get away with doing that on a long-term basis? Obviously the victims are bound to catch on eventually, and then the proof is right there where even police can find it."
I suspect many people have done far worse and got away with it for far longer.
Daniel Morgan springs to mind, and there are plenty of others who have been swindled and the perps got away with it.
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-57484219
That's a completely different kind of crime, though. Assuming you mean the bent cops, that is. They try to hide what they do.
Same applies to most crimes. There's some prospect of claiming it wasn't you, or otherwise getting away with it, once the crime is discovered. Either that or the perps flee the jurisdiction with the proceeds.
In this case, as soon as the crime was discovered, it was not only obvious who did it, but there was direct evidence to prove it and no possible defence. And obviously no chance it wouldn't be discovered fairly soon.
"He struggles to explain why he acted in this foolish way."
Has he considered "Greed"?
Oh, hang on, did that refer to stealing £800,000 from an NHS trust, or using his own name as director of the two companies he used for the fraud which lead ultimately to his arrest?
Even the internet ransomware attackers claim to avoid targeting health service providers as I recall from a recent Register article (cannot seem to find it just now, however). I do hope that when (and it is likely it will be when rather than if) he receives medical attention during his prison stay, he reflects on what that £800,000 could have paid for.
OK, rant over, but as a recipient of NHS care I am more than somewhat annoyed by what he did.
> Has he considered "Greed"?
Maybe he thought that everyone does it. After all, you see all the time that people higher up fix contracts with their friends and nothing happens. You may even think that this is a less serious offence than kissing a colleague without observing the guidance.
I can imagine the aspect of "Greed" when it comes to the fact that he has done it solo. If he got friends to set up and front these companies...
"
I do hope that when (and it is likely it will be when rather than if) he receives medical attention during his prison stay, he reflects on what that £800,000 could have paid for.
"
About 100,000 masks that have to be thrown away as unsuitable? A small fraction of a test & trace app that doesn't work?
The judge can't just decide on a longer sentence, no matter how upset he (or we) are about him stealing from a hospital.
There are sentencing guidelines in place in the UK, which you can look up yourself to try to ensure some consistency.
So, as the judge said, he was given eight years, which is the maximum he could get for this offence. And he was given the standard one-third reduction for a guilty plea.
So five years and four months is the most he could give. You might not think it's enough, and I might be tempted to agree in this case, but the judge actually did throw the book at him.
800k for 5 years in sing sing. This guy ain't stupid. He divorced his wife so there will be a financial settlement from the divorce and they can't touch her for this as she didn't commit a crime. I bet she has the house that the money was spent on. He gets out in 2.5 and they get back together, sell the house and profit. People like this are scum. If you want to rob a hedge fund or investment banker go for it but a public service already struggling, I don't think so.
"Some of these emails would supposedly come from individuals working at Data Centre Power Ltd and BNC Communications Ltd, Sarah Mills and Simon Wood. There's no evidence these individuals worked for these companies; these were essentially false identities used by Mr Stannard."
Forget who the emails were coming from, look at who they were going to! He had approval authority for £7,500 and made off with £800,000. That's at least 107 payments spanning eight years, and nobody receiving these emails gave any thought to check on the suppliers? No mention in meetings, at the water cooler, etc.? Budgets?
"MEHT oversaw some of the worst performing hospitals in the country at the time of Stannard's fraud, said the judge, explicitly linking that poor performance with the money he stole."
Barry wasn't helping any, but £100,000 per year isn't going to break a hospital, much less a trust. That's like one additional full-time employee. The trust obviously has (or had) more serious problems. Mark my words, there are many more incompetents, accomplices, and indeed additional Barrys to be found.
Home improvement. Right. House was sold. Right. When, and to whom? If sold before he was caught, what has he been spending the fraud money on since then? If sold after he was caught, hello? This guy is a fraudster through and through, the home improvement angle is *obviously* a charade to keep the funds from being reclaimed. The wife, assuming she exists, should also be investigated as an accomplice.
The investigators need to start using tinfoil.
Don't overestimate the competence of local government.
Some years back my company was designing a computer system for tracking and managing payments to care homes from the council.
During the design process we asked :
Company : "How do you make and audit payments?"
Council : "The care homes send us invoices and we pay them"
COmpany "But how do you audit them?"
Council "Sometimes we check at the end of the year"
"As well as creating fake identities to help disguise his fraud, Stannard was also including VAT on his invoices, something his barrister Paul Webb told the court was purely so the fraud looked convincing."
Every fule kno you don't mess with the VAT man.
Also, admitting to an additional fraud to make your original fraud look more convincing isn't a smart move.
In 2018 Warwick University had it at 31k managers in NHS England with a third of them also either doctors or nurses with clinical responsibilities. Government reported 116k NHS England doctors and 285k nurses in 2019 so I'm not sure what you misunderstood to reach your conclusions - everything, possibly.
Whatever else it is, the NHS is a massive watering hole and staff at all levels do really well but they have to play by the rules, that's where Stannard went wrong.
Seriously, how could he think its in any way undetectable?
One of the easiest checks is to compare payroll bank a/c details with bought ledger payees. You don't even need the names and addresses, just sort code and a/c no. Concatenate them in Excel to make unique strings and then make it show you the duplicates in pink. Send the duplicates back to HR and Finance for further investigation.
Baring the obvious sticking point of couples (married or otherwise), who have a joint bank account for salaries, this can quickly reveal phantom staff as well.
Its not like this is Superman III with fractions of a cent hiding under rounding errors. This was a stupid crime from the beginning and was doomed to being exposed the first time anyone did any due diligience.
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