MoD lets £425,000 slip
Although he was eventually caught, an Ayrshire man has proven your scribe’s theory that the best way to circumvent ‘The System’ is to be part of ‘The System’, whatever system we may be talking about.
The news reports that a company boss swindled the Ministry of Defence (MoD) out of nearly £425,000 by inventing staff he claimed were working at Devonport Dockyard in Plymouth. He used a simple clocking-in scam and bribes to systematically milk sums during the upgrading of the nuclear submarine repair and refuelling facility for Royal Navy Trident submarines. In reality, up to 58 ‘ghost’ staff were either at home, in the pub, no longer worked there, never had, or did not exist. In other cases, unsuspecting genuine workers had their hours inflated. The court heard the scam was so blatant that even when everyone went on strike, many of his staff still managed to put in a full day’s work on paper, and non-existent scaffolders being paid a total of £27,000 a week.
The MoD police case officer involved force was pleased with the outcome after it held a “long and complex inquiry“, and added that the convictions “should act as a warning“, and that confiscation proceedings would be held later.
Although this group was caught and convicted, and we don’t know the full details of how long they were under investigation, one has to wonder about the system used to monitor the accounts and activities involved, and vet the contractors working on what should be an extremely secure facility.
It’s not as if such places aren’t secure against strangers - Yours Truly almost had a day at Faslane aborted when a pair of fools, arriving there at the same time, mislaid their passes between being issued with them, and arriving at the gatehouse. Not only were they not going to get through the door, but the security staff were going to throw out everyone that arrived at the same time, just to be sure there was nothing going on. But this case arose from someone who had a foot in the door, and past experience tells me that that’s the most dangerous situation, when assumptions are made, and defences lowered without thinking.
