Man jailed over stop smoking scam
Updated on 20 August 2008
A judge has hit out at the Government's target-driven culture as he jailed a "no smoking adviser" for 18 months for pocketing a £90,000 NHS fortune.
He said the scheme to convince addicts to kick the habit relied on members of the public with little training and was distinctly "amateurish" and "cavalier".
Judge John Hillen said: "This scheme has properly been described as pseudo-medical. To pay lay people, albeit briefly trained, as stop smoking counsellors for recruiting and spending a few sessions with smokers is an astonishing way to spend public money."
The way Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust operated the scheme "without any checks whatsoever is an extraordinary derogation of responsibility," he said.
"This was all driven by the need to meet targets and it is a feature of the target-driven culture of the governments of this country that it can lead to the distortion of proper functions and can lead, as in this case, to the opportunity for fraud."
In the dock was jobless Harry Singer who recognised the lax regime as an "opportunity" to print money by inventing an army of imaginary "quitters".
The 55-year-old, described outside court by police as a "Walter Mitty", used most of the money to pose as the community philanthropist.
According to a library of bogus paperwork, he chalked up an "unprecedented performance" - 27 times better than the next best adviser - resulting in him singled-handedly shattering the local target and winning a 2006 nomination for the Stop Smoking Supporter Award.
London's Blackfriars Crown Court heard that in the process he claimed £45 for each of the 2,017 imaginary "successes" achieved in an impossibly short six months.
Passing sentence the judge told the impassive defendant: "I know the jury and I and anyone else listening to this case would have been appalled at the cavalier way in which the taxpayers' money was dealt with by the Kensington and Chelsea Primary Care Trust and the positively amateurish way in which the finance department failed to have any sufficient checks on the money it was paying out on the no smoking service. That allowed a fraud to occur which would have been obvious to anyone on the most superficial inquiry. This was not a sophisticated fraud."
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