19 separate identities and $82,000 stolen: Man jailed for part in Covid relief fraud

Shane Douglas McNally was jailed for his part in defrauding the Small Business Cashflow Scheme (SBCS) during the Covid pandemic.

An Upper Hutt man has been jailed for nearly four years after fraudulently receiving more than $82,000 in Covid support.

Shane Douglas McNally was sentenced on November 8 after pleading guilty to 68 fraud related charges from the Inland Revenue Department (IRD), the Ministry of Social Development (MSD) and police.

Twenty-one of those charges were from the IRD and involved Small Business Cashflow Scheme (SBCS) fraud.

In 2020, McNally and his co-accused, Brendon Blair McBride, made 21 SBCS applications under 19 separate identities.

Each application was for $11,800 and confirmed they met the scheme’s criteria, including that they had a viable business and had experienced a decline of revenue of more than 30%.

Seven of those applications were accepted and $82,600 was paid out to the pair. The remaining 14 applications were declined.

However, the pair’s offending came to light after the IRD began an investigation in June 2020 which found McNally and McBride were both receiving the unemployment benefit and neither met the criteria for a SBCS loan.

In sentencing McNally, Judge Bill Hastings noted the exploitation of the high-trust SBCS loan in a time of national crisis; the premeditation of the offending; and the extent of financial gain sought, and loss suffered by the IRD and MSD. McNally was sentenced to three years and 11 months in prison.

Co-offender McBride was sentenced in 2021 on SBCS fraud charges, and again in August this year on income tax and police charges.

Last month, Waikato man Jarryd Delroy Hector received 11 months of home detention and 150 hours of community service for fraudulently receiving $53,400 in Covid wage subsidy payments.

And in September, Christchurch man Adam James Letchford was jailed for using the identities of 10 strangers – including a dead person – to apply for more than $65,000 in Covid wage subsidy payments on top of the nearly $30,000 he’d already received using his own name.