Sando businessman fined for VAT fraud
A San Fernando businessman was on Tuesday fined a total of $90,000 after he pleaded guilty to VAT fraud when he appeared before magistrate Indar Jagroo in the San Fernando magistrates’ court.
Shannon Sookhoo was charged by the Board of Inland Revenue (BIR) for knowingly supplying false information to the board in support of his VAT returns. He was fined $9,000 for each offence.
Sookhoo was charged by Selwyn Gobin, a criminal tax investigator.
After the businessman pleaded guilty, special prosecutor Evans Welch withdrew similar charges against Sookhoo’s wife, who was jointly charged with her husband.
The evidence presented by the BIR was that Sookhoo was registered with the board and his VAT returns for September 1, 2008 to August 31, 2009, were selected for audit.
He supplied his accounts detailing his business activities and invoices he received from suppliers.
A tax monitor with the BIR checked the invoices against the ledger entries from several car parts suppliers and became suspicious after a gas filter was purportedly purchased at a higher price than what had been sold by the supplier.
Gobin began his investigations and it was discovered that, at least nine times, Sookhoo’s business submitted invoices to the BIR, which were altered, increasing the amounts and falsely inflating the expenses of his business.
These altered invoices were supplied by Sookhoo as evidence of his expenses for the VAT period investigated by the BIR.
According to the evidence, the fraudulent alterations to the invoices were verified by Sookhoo’s car parts suppliers, who all said their records showed that the duplicate copies of the invoices kept by them were for lesser amounts than what Sookhoo supplied to the BIR for the audit.
The total value of the inflated sum to the nine invoices amounted to $25,410.
Sookhoo’s attorney, Gilbert Peterson SC, asked that his client be fined instead of a custodial sentence being imposed because of his previous clean record and his plea.
This was not resisted by Welch, who asked that a significant fine be imposed.
Welch told the magistrate the country’s economy depended heavily on honesty in the payment of taxes, and any fraud had potentially serious adverse effects.
He said fraudulent alterations of documents were treated seriously in most countries with heavy penalties being imposed.
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"Sando businessman fined for VAT fraud"