Back-to-work firm’s staff jailed after scam that cost us £300,000

SIX former employees of a welfare-to-work firm were jailed yesterday for forging files in a scam that cost the taxpayer almost £300,000.

They became involved in the massive fraud through a ‘culture of dishonesty’ at A4e, which was founded by David Cameron’s millionaire former jobs tsar Emma Harrison.

Another four ex- members of staff received suspended prison sentences for what Judge Angela Morris said were ‘deceitful and unscrupulous’ practices.

In a telling aside, she said it was not for her to decide whether more senior managers should also be held to account.

The ten people sentenced yesterday falsified employer details, time sheets and jobseeker signatures to inflate the numbers they said they had helped into work.

The Department of Work and Pensions paid A4e a £1,775 bounty for each of the first 500 candidates it helped into jobs, and then £888 for every successful placement after that. It was paid for 558 successes – but nearly a third of these proved to be faked. The cost to the public purse was around £288,000.

The scam was based on a programme called Inspire to Aspire and designed to assist single parents in the Thames Valley to find jobs. It earned A4e more than £1.3million between August 2008 and June 2011.

Some of the employees received considerable bonuses in their monthly pay packets as a result of their fakery.

Genuine jobseekers whose names were used for the fraud when they did not in fact take part in the scheme may have had their benefits reduced or stopped.

Passing sentence at Reading Crown Court, Judge Morris attacked the failure of A4e managers to impose checks on whether claims submitted to the DWP were valid.

‘The lack of any independent verification procedure in this case allowed a number of employees to engage in deceitful and unscrupulous practices for their own or another’s financial gain at the expense of the public purse,’ she said.

A whistleblower alerted senior management to the fraud in November 2010, but files continued to be forged until March 2011.

The judge said ‘innumerable’ files were ‘nothing more than wholesale forgeries from start to finish’.

The judge added: ‘ In this case there is a considerable volume of documents which have been totally fabricated, manipulated, backdated or altered in other ways in an effort to give a wholly misleading impression about the way that the contract was being implemented.’

A4e recruiter Julie Grimes, 52, from Staines, Surrey, who was jailed for 26 months, was put under huge pressure to meet unrealistic targets by managers who did not care how she met them, the court heard.

Her barrister Steven Pidcock said: ‘She was immersed in a culture of dishonesty that she didn’t have the moral fibre to resist.

‘It doesn’t start from the roots - this sort of thing starts from the top of the tree.’

Dean Lloyd, 38, of Milton Keynes, who received a 15-month sentence, had no idea about the ‘dishonesty intrinsic in A4e’ until after he had accepted the job, the hearing was told. His lawyer Rhodri James said: ‘To some extent it almost seemed acceptable because those who worked there, particularly in the hierarchy, were so entrenched in their dishonest practices.’

Contract manager Ines CanoUribe, 39, of Madrid, was jailed for 18 months, while Charles McDonald, 44, of Egham, Surrey, who faked documents to get bonuses to support his drug habit, received a sentence of 40 months.

There was also a prison term of 22 months for Nikki Foster, 31, of Reading, and one of 15 months for

‘Deceitful and unscrupulous’

Bindiya Dholiwar, 29, of Slough.

Suspended 12-month sentences were given to Zabar Khalil, 35, of Slough, Matthew Hannigan-Train, 31, of Bristol, and Hayley Wilson, 27, of Milton Keynes. Aditi Singh, 32, of Slough received a ten-month suspended sentence.

Cano-Uribe, Khalil, HanniganTrain and Hayley Wilson had denied forgery, but were found guilty by a jury after a trial that lasted for 12 weeks. The other six pleaded guilty.

A4e Group chief executive Andrew Dutton said: ‘We are obvi- ously disappointed and sorry that there were people working for us on this historical contract who behaved dishonestly, and in doing so let down the customers we had intended them to help and the taxpayer.

‘A4e long ago set aside the money to pay back the DWP the amount it received as a result of the unsubstantiated claims and we have ensured that the taxpayer will have lost nothing from the conduct of the people involved.’