A hospital consultant and high-profile social media influencer has been sentenced at Kingston Crown Court to 24 months suspended thanks to the work of NHS counter fraud professionals.
Dr Kifayat Ullah pleaded guilty in December to defrauding the NHS of more than £50K by submitting false timesheets during his time as a locum at Kingston Hospital NHS Foundation Trust.
Local Counter Fraud Specialists and the NHS Counter Fraud Authority Fraud Hub worked together to fully uncover the extent of Dr Ullah’s offending following an audit at the Trust identifying discrepancies within records presented. After extensive investigations revealed the full scale of the dishonesty, a file was presented to the Crown Prosecution Service, who agreed that the evidence available warranted a charge of making a false instrument with intent it be accepted as genuine under the Forgery and Counterfeiting Act 1981.
At sentencing the Judge His Honour Trigilgas-Davey said: “His actions stem from greed, he has brought disgrace on himself and his profession.”
Dr Ullah was recruited as a locum consultant to help with post-covid backlog within the Trust. He almost immediately asked to reduce his hours to part-time working. However, for six months, he submitted 29 forged timesheets to his agency purporting that he was working full time and was paid accordingly. Some timesheets were altered after genuine authorising signature others he just made up himself and forged or copied signatures.
NHSCFA Head of Operations Richard Rippin said: “We are delighted with the sentence given out, and I commend the action taken by Kingston Hospital and the Lead Investigator on this case”, Lorna Barry KPMG LLP. This was a blatant abuse of Dr Ullah’s position of trust and a deliberate attempt to take, for his own personal gain, NHS money intended for the provision of patient care.
“This action demonstrates the value and impact of the local counter fraud response working across the NHS to identify and pursue offenders like this and protect NHS funds from this type of deliberate fraud.”