Gambling-addicted tax advisers jailed for fraud

Two gambling-addicted accountants who don’t appear to know each other but who ripped off their clients – and HMRC - by forging customers’ tax returns have been jailed.

The first accountant, Gail Henshall, filed false self-assessment claims worth £296,000 on behalf of 200 unsuspecting clients, generating big repayments which she then gambled away.

The second accountant, Melvin Moore, inflated the turnover and expenses on his customers’ tax returns, resulting in fake repayments of £260,000, of which he used £170,000 to gamble.

Both the accountants pulled the same trick to cover their tracks – altering the addresses on their clients’ tax returns so that all postal contact from the Revenue would never reach them.

Henshall’s fraud – she pleaded guilty to two counts – was more prolonged, lasting from March 2008 until January 2014, but she had some help, heard Wolverhampton Crown Court.

Her friend, Mario Troisi, laundered the money which Henshall received from HMRC, as he channelled it into a bank account and then transferred it into online betting accounts for her use.

Troisi was sentenced to 32 months in prison, as was Henshall who the Revenue said “despicably” used money for public services “to feed her gambling habit.”

Meanwhile Moore also used client details as a smokescreen and his “professional status as a front,” said HMRC, condemning the former sole director of Essex-based Rubix Accounting.

Being sentenced at Basildon Crown Court to a year in jail, Moore was told by the judge: “You abused your position as an accountant. Knowing how to use Revenue systems enabled you to put in claims and you took the money to pay off your gambling debts.”