novbaby31 wrote:
I have no real sympathy for him - he didn't forget to pay tax or make a mistake - he engaged in activiters to deliberately defraud the state.
On the sentance - I think six years is fine - it sends a fairly strong message about how serious stealing from the state is. On the inequity - I would rather see focus on increasing the sentances for violent crimes than reducing this one.
I agree. He systematically, deliberately, and consciously set out to defraud the State (i.e. you and me, the taxpayers) and continued to do so over many years, for purely selfish profit motives.
It was not up to him nor any other individual to decide for themselves that a particular tax or duty was "ridiculous" or unjustified and to unilaterally decide to falsify documentation to avoid paying it. I do feel the sentence could be seen as heavy, but it is two sentences for what were four sample charges. If he had been tried for all the potential charges over the many years he was doing this, and got a small sentence for each, he'd probably be in jail a lot longer.
The uproar when someone admits to or is suspected of making false social welfare claims, which would come to far, far less than this man stole from the State, is in stark contrast to the sentiment here. Consider how little attention
this thread got, concerning a
man who defrauded the State of less than a sixth of what Paul Begley managed and who was jailed for over 12 years for his trouble.
I do think as a society we need to consider whether we wish to reduce or even eliminate custodial sentences for non-violent crimes. But at present, we have not done so, and I don't think that deciding that nice, respectable, white-collar criminals who have cash can be exempt from prison sentences, whilst those who cannot or do not tick those boxes will be sent to jail, is how to deal with that. It smacks of one law for the rich and one for the poor (and I accept that in many ways this already exists; I am saying that exacerbating it is not the way to go).
And the argument that he shouldn't be jailed because others have not yet been brought to justice is like saying no-one who is on trial for assault should be sentenced until all murder cases for that year have been brought to trial, because they're more serious and if a murderer hasn't yet gone to prison why should someone who only beat someone else up? One has nothing to do with the other.
My children spend a lot of time trying to persuade me that bad behaviour on the part of one of them justifies further bad behaviour from another. ("But she jumped on the couch/threw toys around/pushed me/screamed/didn't do her homework yesterday!") I don't accept it as an excuse from them and I certainly don't accept it as an excuse from grown adults.
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