Friday 13 January 2012

I Guess We Know Who Really Needed ‘Learning Skills’…

The team of con artists sent bills to Castle College worth a total of £475,391 for fake training courses which people never attended. The bills were paid using Government money.
Bzzzzz! Wrong!

The bills were paid using our money. Taxpayer money.
Six members of the conspiracy were jailed at Nottingham Crown Court while two received suspended sentences.

Kay Edwards, 45, of Heathery Drive, Forest Town, used her job as an administrator at Castle College to provide Birkenhead-based Training Options UK Ltd with details of people who had previously completed courses at the college, which is based in Maid Marian Way and Beeston.

The details were then used by her conspirators to complete false work books, assessments and feedback forms and to submit false invoices.
Which, if anyone was using any sort of system to prevent fraud at all, wouldn’t have worked.

But hey, it’s only taxpayer money, right?
The cash came from the Learning Skills Council, funded by the Government.
NO! Funded by US!
Judge Michael Stokes QC said: "I have to sentence you eight for what has rightly been described as a sophisticated and prolonged fraud. It is a particularly aggravating feature of this case that the ultimate victims of this fraud are the taxpayer.

"There is no doubt in my mind that this fraud couldn't have taken place had Castle College and the other college in Warwickshire had proper systems for monitoring teaching that was carried out by independent contractors."
So why aren’t THEY in the dock too..?

5 comments:

Bobo said...

The Welfare State is a machine designed to do little more than haemorrhage money. The wonder is that anyone is ever caught siphoning off sums which are sometimes considerable.

From taxi drivers with declared weekly earnings which are miraculously always just within the threshold to allow them to claim maximum bennies ("Fifty-five pounds fifty pee, mate. Innit.") to Local Govt-funded 'Voluntary Organisations' whose only discernable function is to exist to recieve the generous annual cheque from the local Council Tax payer.No real audit, no real scrutiny.

Millions upon millions of pounds locally, billions upon billions nationally.

I hope to be taking redundancy soon. And when I do, I'm going to sing like a feckin canary.

A salt and battered said...

@ sbo
"Do you have any tips on how to get listed in Yahoo News?"
Given any thought to gatecrashing?

"FRAUDSTERS who conned a city college out of almost half-a-million pounds were yesterday told they had taken advantage of the taxpayer."

If defendants were so informed, the Court owed the same courtesy to the Principal of the de facto soup kitchen known as Castle College.

Anonymous said...

But, but... the whole college education system is a fraud. People with no real interest in subjects (computer 'students' who are there to play games, etc) turn up -- occasionally in some cases -- and do bugger all are nurtured along. The colleges won't get rid of them as these timewasters are the meal ticket for all employed there: getting the hopeless through the academic year so they can achieve a useless certificate is all that counts as the college receives government money that way. They would get nothing for being honest and throwing out the dross.

So the pressure is on colleges to keep the unproductive there in order to keep the unemployed queues down, so what's a little more fraud in an already fraudulent system?

Captain Haddock said...

Julia ..

FYI ... sbo or sbobet is nothing more than a spamming troll, who has appeared, with the same load of old pony on at least 4 blogs which I've visited this morning ..

JuliaM said...

"The Welfare State is a machine designed to do little more than haemorrhage money."

It's one of the few government schemes that's working even better than anticipated!

"But, but... the whole college education system is a fraud."

Well, not ALL of it. But it certainly has been debased over the last few years...

"FYI ... sbo or sbobet is nothing more than a spamming troll..."

Cheers for that! It's been zapped.

Is it just me, or is there a hell of a lot more spam in the last few days? Here, and on Twitter?