Mums, dads new crims
Ordinary investors are ‘led’ to use scams
ORDINARY mums and dads are effectively joining organised crime networks through unscrupulous lawyers, accountants and liquidators promoting ways to defraud the Commonwealth of millions of dollars, the Australian Federal Police has found.
Such is the extent of the structured scam, the AFP in unison with 17 partner federal agencies including the ATO and Department of Human Services is to priority target “professional facilitators” in the legal, financial and insolvency sectors.
Just a single professional facilitator could be helping as many as 10 to 15 people rip off various federal services.
While reticent to detail precisely how the fraud is being carried out, the AFP has the following rackets in its sights: ■ Medicare ■ PAYG tax ■ The National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) ■ Childcare ■ Overseas money laundering
“That’s why we are not calling it white collar crime anymore,” AFP’s Fraud and AntiCorruption Detective Acting Superintendent Simone O’Mahony said yesterday.
“It’s not the (high level financier) putting the greatest threat against our programs like the NDIS scheme, it’s not going to be your high level senior executives. It is sometimes just the mums and dads but it’s the professional facilitators that are actually helping setting AFP’s Fraud and Anti-Corruption Detective Acting Superintendent Simone O’Mahony up these ‘companies’ for them, giving them advice about how to do that, so that’s where we are spending a lot of the AFP time in taking out those facilitators.
“The offshore nature of organised crime means that people are becoming more calculated in their attempts to cheat our tax system.”
In some cases, through the use of lawyers working in with accountants, shelf companies for child services were created to either directly defraud the NDIS and other Commonwealth social services and the ATO and/or actively move money offshore.
Accountants were also assisting families make fraudulent claims through family networks, and the unscrupulous accountant would get referrals to help other mums and dads set up scams.