Bloke gets six years in slammer after fessing up to £4.75m tax scam A businessman from Essex, UK, has been jailed for six years for claiming back sales tax on computer memory sold overseas in a deception also known at carousel fraud. Robert Waterman funded a lavish lifestyle of expensive houses, luxury cars and a Marbella holiday home through a scam in which he pretended to trade memory sticks …
VAT is mostly done through self assessment. so Yes, it is that easy, however its also quite easy to prove your fiddling it if you get investigated so I'd imagine that very few people do it - there will be less easily detectable scams out there.
All HMRC would need to do in this case is ask him to provide proof of purchase for his stock that he has been shipping and hes screwed. He could have been crafty, actually bought the stock claimed to have shipped it but sold it for undetectable cash or bitcoins somewhere.... but that would have been too much like actual work for the lazy fuck stain.
"VAT is mostly done through self assessment. so Yes, it is that easy"
Theoretically.
In practice, there are various red flags built into the system that will get you onto their radar.
One of the red flags works in the following simplified manner :
In a normal business the expectation is that you will always end up paying HMRC something, because the expectation is that a business is profit-making and therefore the balance always tips in HMRC's favour of being the one to receive a cheque in the post.
There are perfectly kosher circumstances whereby a business may occasionally end up with a HMRC sending them the cheque instead. However, too many of those circumstances (or too odd a pattern or whatever), and at best you'll end up with a friendly tea & biscuits session from your local HMRC officer who will come for an informal sniff-around your offices and your files ... but if you're doing something really fishy, then the big guns at HQ will take interest.
There are other red flags out there too, some of them industry specific. There are various "schemes" that HMRC are aware of in relation to IT and Telecoms, and they take specific additional monitoring steps for companies involved in those areas.
>In a normal business the expectation is that you will always end up paying HMRC something, because the expectation is that a business is profit-making
I think in this case, because the "goods were being exported" outside the EU, reclaiming VAT would be expected on a profitable business.
However, defrauding the UK government and then keeping assets under UK government jurisdiction? D'oh!
Sounds like a typical candidate to be on The Apprentice. Sadly, I caught a few minutes of it in the PIP corner of the screen while looking for something worthwhile on the Tivo box. It was a crap show when it first started (I watched a few episode) but judging by the few minutes I saw the other night, it's gone far, far down hill in terms of the arrogance of the contestants. IIRC it was some twat stating he was going to be Prime Minister but first he'd a become a billionaire. Luckily I quickly found my recording of The Sky At Night and spent a happy time watching some fantastic images from Rosetta.
El Reg is the only trustworthy place for news
Don't forget Private Eye. Though you'll have to go and buy a paper copy...
"You and Yours" - BBC Radio 4, 16 Sept. 2016
"We talk to Private Eye editor Ian Hislop about his thirty year tenure on the satirical magazine. It's paper-only but sales are at a thirty year high. How has he done it?"
http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b07tqq66#playt=0h34m53s
There's somebody reading this thinking "I really should stop about now"
For some reason that reminded me of this cartoon :).
They usually like to see bank statements. If you don't pay the invoice within six months, you have to repay any VAT you claimed on it. Also they will check that the VAT number on the invoice is valid, you can do this yourself at http://ec.europa.eu/taxation_customs/vies/ and they might visit the supplier to see if they declare it as a sale.
Shows where "the system" has its values. It's a fair wedge, admittedly, but it's not as if this guy ran a couple of 'virtual presence' mail forwarding addresses in posh bits of London, run by shell companies in various trading partners names, each buying off the other, charging real people for the privilege, yet hiding in another barely related address well away from things, and then running a copyright trolling business on the side that caused very real distress to ordinary people by demanding money with spurious threats of legal action, before stamping on an innocent Uber driver's face in a drunken rage outside an exclusive members-only club that had refused him entry, and then only getting 20 measly weeks in clink, whilst crying on about how that would ruin his life and all those that worked for him.
Money before people. Yeah, swapping those sentences over would seem more like justice.
...
</Rant>
Erm, it's a bit high on this horse - can anyone give me a hand down...?
Bravo sir, Bravo.
As much as I don't like what he has done, it is completely disingenuous for HMRC to state
"We will not tolerate tax fraud and our job doesn’t finish when someone is jailed. We will now continue our confiscation proceedings to reclaim all the money he stole,” added Barton.
I suspect the press release really went something like this before the publicity guys re-wrote it
"We will not tolerate tax fraud from someone who didn't employ one of us to develop appropriate loopholes and our job doesn’t finish when someone is jailed unless of course they were rich enough to have paid the appropriatebribesconsultancy fees, in this case we ensure a reduced sentence in a no-security prison so they can still go home every weekend, honestly, between you and I, it's more like a county club. We will now continue our confiscation proceedings to reclaim all the money he stole because, once again, he did NOT go about this in the right way. If only he had listened and employed one of us, we could have earned him significantly more, even after our cut, and we wouldn't have touched it whilst he was at the spa for a few weeks either,”lamentedadded Barton.
So let me get this straight, the guy got more jail time for nicking money, than the average rapist, child murderer gets for destroying or taking a life/lives respectively?
Is it me or is there something wrong with this woodcut?
Not to mention the copper who was late for his dinner and ploughed into a teenage girl at 93mph in a 30mph limit?! (I think he might have got 5 years (10 minutes after good behavior)).
Methinks this society has its priorities in one hell of a muddle..
I thought carousel fraud was simply the stupidly high price they charge for fairground rides, to the point where you might as well buy your own.
:)
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As we've seen recently when the yobs break into a server the operator can get fined if they'd not taken adequate steps to secure it. Why doesn't the same thing apply when they're able to run a long fraud against HMRC? Maybe a few bad annual reports, no increments, no bonuses, that sort of thing.
If they catch him early, they can only claim to have caught say £100,000 of fraud. It won't make the headlines, and getting the money back would be simpler as he would have less time to hide the money. By waiting an extra year or two, they show that they are hauling in a big fish, and can employ a whole team for a year to track the money and bring it back.
In the mean time, a thousand commentards are I thinking "What a clueless twit - I could do it much better and retire in Brazil before they catch on." We will be reading about one of them five years from now. Excuse we while I get back to my paperless NHS software scam proposal.
"with cash that should have been funding vital public services.”
cf GDS has no real strategy for £450m budget pot, internal plan reveals
It makes you wonder.
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