A SENIOR IT manager faces jail after admitting scamming the NHS out of more than £800,000 in a seven-year procurement fiddle.

Barry David Stannard appeared at Chelmsford Crown Court yesterday (Thursday, 27 May), where he admitted two counts of fraud by false representation and two counts of cheating the public revenue while working as a senior IT manager for the Mid Essex Hospital Trust (MEHT).

Stannard is due to be sentenced at Chelmsford Crown Court on June 30.

The 53-year-old, who now lives in Chelmsford, was head of unified communications at MEHT, which has since been merged into the Mid and South Essex NHS Foundation Trust, when the offences took place.

As a band 8B Senior Manager, he was in a position of trust. The court case comes at a time when the NHSCFA has renewed its focus on procurement fraud, and is encouraging more people to report any suspicion of it through the established reporting lines.

The court heard that concerns arose after the trust ran a data matching exercise on its payroll and 'accounts payable' records, alongside Companies House records.

While Stannard had submitted a 'nil return' declaration of interests form to the trust, an investigation confirmed he was actually the director of two companies that had received a large amount of money from the trust between 2012 and 2019.

No products or services invoiced for by these companies were ever provided to the NHS.

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Initial enquiries were conducted by the local counter fraud specialist provider, RSM, and the investigation was escalated to the national level investigation by the NHS Counter Fraud Authority (NHSCFA) as the likely scale of the losses emerged.

The NHSCFA said hundreds of invoices submitted by Stannard's own companies to MEHT were all individually for relatively modest amounts – meaning he was authorised to sign them off without further checks.

On the invoices he submitted, Stannard also charged for VAT which was never forwarded to HMRC. The VAT registration number quoted was false and related to another legitimate company and the VAT he charged the NHS made up £132,000 of the total £806,229.80 he defrauded and which came from MEHT's IT budget.