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

the clerks to see if Stevens, one of the two directors, could come in and spare them a few moments. When he arrived Jack referred him to the two piles of copy invoices, and pointed out the differences in the descriptions of the services provided.
    ‘From what we have seen in your own documents and correspondence, it seems that the only thing distinguishing the two piles is what I would call the calculated ambiguity, or rather misdescription, of the wording on the smaller pile of invoices. Can you tell us what that is all about?’
    ‘It was done if a client requested it.’
    ‘Didn’t that seem odd to you?’
    ‘It did, but if that was what the client wanted I wasn’t going to turn away good business.’
    ‘Did any of your clients say why they wanted their holiday arrangements to be described in such misleading and ambiguous terms on the invoices — without any reference to the holiday arrangements at all?’
    ‘No.’
    ‘Did you not think to ask them, or wonder why?’
    ‘No. That was their business. It didn’t seem to me that there was anything particularly wrong in obliging them. If I didn’t, then probably someone else would.’
    ‘And can you say when you were first asked to provide an invoice in this form.’
    ‘I would say not more than four, perhaps five years ago.’
    When they were again alone Tony looked at Jack with a wry smile.
    ‘Well I’ve been at this game almost thirty years, but it’s the first time I’ve met a scam like this. The bugger’s lying of course. He knows as well as you and I why his clients want them like this, and it looks as though there must be scores of them. I’m not surprised they get plenty of business.’
    Jack couldn’t have agreed more. Most accountants who came across such invoices would have absolutely no immediate reason to suspect that they were for anything other than proper business expenditure, and the few who queried them would almost certainly quite readily accept whatever codged-up explanation was offered to them. It was, as Tony said, ‘A very nice little scam: half-price holidays subsidised by you, me and the bloke next door.’
    As the company kept its records for six years before disposing of them, they began at once to examine and extract all the dodgy invoices for those six years. This they would normally have continued to do together, but Tony had another appointment which meant that he had to leave by early afternoon.
    Left to himself Jack carried on alone for almost three hours, with the work taking longer than expected, and he was just winding up and getting together the books, invoices and papers that he intended to take away to complete the analysis at leisure when Stevens put his head round the door.
    ‘I wonder if you could spare me a few moments before you leave Mr Manning.’
    ‘Surely,’ said Jack. ‘Just let me finish strapping this pile of documents together … Right, fire away.’
    ‘This is an unusual situation for me as you can imagine Mr Manning, and I think I now understand why it is that you are so interested in those particular invoices.’
    He paused, but as Jack said nothing was obliged to speak again.
    ‘I find it rather difficult to know how to proceed … I wonder if I could ask you, do you have any sort of scope for compromise in your proceedings?’
    ‘I’m not sure I understand you Mr Stevens. What exactly do you mean by compromise?’
    Stevens had clearly been hoping for something a little more helpful than that, and paused again as though casting about for the right form of words.
    ‘Well the truth of the matter is that among the invoices that interest you there are several for just one concern where I would rather things didn’t go any further, and I wondered if there was any way in which that might be achieved. I am ignorant in such matters of course, and wondered if you could assist … It would be worth quite a lot to me.’
    By now Jack had absolutely no doubt what was going on. The bugger was