How can you make a salary of £26,000 stretch to buying a horse riding business, a holiday home, luxury holidays and a Range Rover costing £45,000?

It seems that not all accountants are 100% honest.

Whilst the vast majority of accountants are  trustworthy there were two court cases in the UK this week that resulted in jail sentences for accountants.

Gary Gordon, who previously worked for the Big 4 firm PricewaterhouseCoopers, stole £45,000 from his employer UK Mission Enterprises. He rather unimaginatively simple diverted the cash into his own accounts.

He apparently had a gambling habit and didn’t appreciate the amount of money that he had stolen. He’s been jailed for 16 months.

£45,000 however pales into insignificance when compared with £1.3 million which was the amount that Tracey Laws stole from her employer Inchcape Limited.

Inchcape Limited is the parent company of a number of motor trading companies in the UK and for nearly 10 years Laws wrote 75 fraudulent cheques totaling £750,000 to her own horse riding school (which she had set up with money that she had already been stolen from her employers). She had also fraudulently transferred over £500,000 to her husband’s decorating company.

Despite having a maximum annual salary of £26,000 during her time with Inchcape she managed to buy a horse riding school, a holiday home, luxury holidays and a brand new Range Rover.

It wasn’t these mis-matched spending habits that caught her out though. Her crime was uncovered by accident when one of the motor trading companies was changing payment systems and two employees noticed a cheque made out to West Acres Stables (the stables owned by Laws).

These two observant individuals noticed that the handwriting looked very much like the handwriting of Tracey Laws. It turned out that it was her hand writing and the end result was that Laws was jailed for four years last week.

No doubt there are new internal controls in place at Inchcape and looking on the bright side for Laws she will at least save her annual accountancy membership fees going forward and she will also have her bed and breakfast supplied free of charge by Her Majesty’s Government for the next few years.