A Little Bit on the Side by John W O' Sullivan Page A

other inventive frauds and imaginative devices that businesses could employ to reduce liability to tax, all of them illegal. The nature of Scott Stevens’ activities, however, did not seem to be such as to lend themselves readily to such machinations, and Jack did not expect the examination to take up much of his time. In the event that would prove to be far from the case, and by the time Jack left at the end of the day he would have embarked on an entirely new path in his life that professionally and privately would be challenging, personally rewarding and downright criminal.
    As was usual on such occasions, Jack was to take with him a fully qualified accountant to deal with any of those esoteric aspects of accountancy in which he was not fully versed. He’d chosen Tony Bewley, a senior accountant of long standing and up to all the dodges: all those that were detectable, that is. Neither Jack nor anyone in the department was in any doubt that there were dodges that weren’t. Indeed most of them could have designed one to order, if that had not been illegal.
    Throughout the morning and into the afternoon they devilled away searching through those areas of the books and records most likely to reveal further fiddles. Apart from a few minor adjustments they found nothing, however, until Tony, who was casting an eye over a selection of copy sales invoices while Jack ferreted away elsewhere, called him over.
    ‘I think there’s something funny going on here Jack, but I can’t for the life of me make out what it is.’
    On the desk in front of Jack he spread out copies of invoices issued to customers over a period of six months. These he had divided into two piles, one large and one smaller, but still containing a good many invoices.
    ‘If you look at these,’ he said, indicating the larger pile, ‘You’ll see that on all of them there is a description, sometimes summarised but more generally in detail, of the holiday or travel facilities that have been provided.’
    Jack flipped through the invoices in the larger pile. All included some reference to rail, train or flight travel, to the nature and cost of hotel accommodation at the destination, or perhaps gave cruise details. A few were for holidays at run-of-the-mill destinations on one of the Costas or a similar resort, but most seemed to be long-haul holidays to pretty classy, up-market destinations and hotels. Jack noted in passing references to ‘no expense spared’ individually guided safaris in South Africa, a ten-week Canberra cruise in stateroom accommodation, and a Sherpa-guided climbing expedition in the Himalayas.
    ‘Do themselves proud, don’t they Jack?’ said Tony. ‘Got to be pretty well breeched to book your holidays with this outfit. But now have a look at these invoices.’
    Jack turned to the smaller pile and quickly flipped through them. Not a reference anywhere on the invoices to flights, cruises, hotels, safaris or indeed to holiday travel of any sort, just a few bland and totally unin-formative lines. ‘Consultation and advice on improving business model,’ and ‘provision of administrative and advisory service’ were two favourites amongst the various phrases adopted, none of which were services the company actually provided.
    ‘Well they must have some other documents of their own for whatever these really relate to,’ said Jack. ‘So let’s have a rake around.’
    From a reference number on one of the invoices they soon found their way to a rank of box files containing not only the documents they were looking for, but all the correspondence between the firm and its clients. With the information from the box files it took them only a few moments to establish that all the invoices were for precisely the same sort of holiday or travel arrangements, only on the invoices in the small pile those arrangements had been deliberately misdescribed.
    ‘Time for a natter with the boss do you think?’ said Tony.
    Jack nodded, and asked one of