THE BOSS of a Hampshire nursery has been accused of having a “blasé” attitude about payment form requests from his staff, a court has heard.

Giving evidence in the trial of a Hampshire couple who allegedly carried out a near £1million National Insurance (NI) and income tax fraud at a nursery, IT worker Irfahn Jariwalla made the claim about manager Michael Scott.

The case centres around claims that Michael Scott and his former wife Marina Scott failed to produce HMRC with documents showing that their employees had paid tax and NI.

In the third day of a four-week trial, Mr Jariwalla was asked about Mr Scott’s attitude towards problems the IT system was having over producing annual tax-end pay slips (P60s) for employees at Pixie's Day Nurseries in Locks Heath and Woolston.

In response Mr Jariwalla described Mr Scott’s attitude as ‘blasé’ and added that he “wouldn't care generally about people's issues with payment slips or payments and staff would complain."

He told jurors Mr Scott was the only person at the company able to authorise P60 requests and that he failed to do so despite employees asking for them.

Mr Jariwalla said he helped to set up a new pay roll computer system and claimed that's when he felt there were problems as too many employees were involved in submitting payment reports on the specialist software.

When the trial started the court heard how staff grew suspicious when they could not find tax certificates and Inland Revenue was not aware of any NI or tax payments being made.

Jurors were told that staff had resigned after finding out payments had not been made.

But while being questioned by prosecutor Robin Leach, Mr Jariwalla revealed that at one point while he was working with Mr Scott he told him he would stay with the company as long as his pay was doubled, which was granted.

The couple, both from Grovesbury, Locks Heath, were arrested on November 3 following an investigation by HMRC for offences which span from 2007 to 2011.

Mr Leach said: "During this period the defendants employed in the region of about 60 members of staff at any one time in these businesses and National Insurance contributions and tax payments through Pay As You Earn were deducted from the wages to a total value of £900,000. We're not dealing with small sums here.

"It's alleged that the defendants failed to file these returns in respect of the deductions being made."

Mr Scott, 63, has denied abusing his position of trust as an employer by failing to account for national insurance contributions and/or PAYE payments.

Marina Scott, 60, has pleaded not guilty to failing to disclose information that national insurance contributions and/or PAYE payments on behalf of staff had not been accounted for.

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