Furlough fraud could spell doom for Harra
Philip Fisher investigates Jim Harra's estimate of the extent of furlough fraud and considers a problem that this could cause for accountants.
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"If Wikipedia is to be believed, he became a tax inspector in 1984, straight out of university in Northern Ireland. In fact, given that he was only 22 at the time, despite his remarkable talents it is more likely that he joined the Inland Revenue as it was in that year and actually became a fully-fledged inspector some time later."
Depends. If he joined on the 'fast-track' scheme, as I did in 1987, he was a Tax Inspector from day 1.
Fair to say I was a pretty useless Tax Inspector on day 1, knowing nothing, but nevertheless that was my job title.
I seriously doubt JH reads Aweb otherwise he would have picked up the phone to me, so that I could then explain how to avoid all this fraud pretty easily (or perhaps he knew himself how to do that and was overruled by the PM, sorry I meant DC).
If I were him I'd quit before the BB loans become due next year.
" Never in the field of human generosity has so much been paid to so many with so few checks"
Furlough scheme fraud is chicken feed compare to the bounce back loan fraud.
Which wont become fully apparent I imagine for 2 or more years.
or "someone else's problem" given the speed of rotation of senior roles in government, and one of those mournful "lessons will be learned" nonsense that accompanies all massive cokes ups of this type undertaken by the predecessor.
The naively of asking the banks to lend without any skin in the game is breathtaking. Even 5% culpability would have cut the fraud by 95%.
BBL cannot be fraud unless not paid back or company goes skint just after receiving it. So let's not jump the gun. There are probably many companies who took it out purely because they were unsure of the future. Once the year is up and everything is back to normal (oh yes it will - panto starting early) the loan is repaid.
In my opinion direct entrant graduate Inspectors were mostly useless. They may have been clever but few had any common sense. I worked my way up from almost the bottom to Inspector level but the direct entrants never had a clue about how income tax (the old Sch D & Sch E) worked and most looked down on the clerical staff with disdain. Nothing changes.
As one of those direct entrants, thanks for the vote of confidence.
There were hundreds of such entrants, so I'm curious as to how many of us you had direct experience of.
Personally, I found those who had worked their way up from almost the bottom to Inspector level all had chips on their shoulders about direct entrants (I didn't really but if we're going to throw around gratuitous insults, I'm happy to join in).
The powers that be would have known that there would be some abuse which most cases will be very hard to prove. So Jimbob how much is it going to cost us to get a few million back? Really not worth it is it? especially with all hands on deck to get MTD for the SE up and running.