Jail for Falsifying Drivers' Expenses ?
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%y/HEN Mr. D. N. O'Sullivan, Hull W Stipendiary Magistrate, fined six British Road Services drivers £10 last week for fraudulently converting subsistence allowances, he said if they came before him again on similar charges he might consider jail sentences.
Spot checks by British Transport Commission officers led to discoveries that drivers spent nights at home
instead of in lodgings. One of the defendants alleged that he had been asked by depot managers on many occasions to falsify his expenses sheets.
• A seventh driver was found guilty on five summonses of this nature and fined £15. He was John Thomas Parkinson, Westlands Drive, Hedon, near Hull. He said that he was a shop steward and was glad that these matters were being brought into the open.
"Those things are being done throughout any depot," he said. "and I have travelled night and day to deliver an urgent load. I have put sheets into the depot and they have been passed."
He said that no time sheets were issued. Discrepancies between time sheets and statutory log sheets could be investigated and proved.
The magistrate asked whether frauds were being worked with the connivance of B.R.S. and Parkinson replied "yes," but he did not think the higher officials knew about it.
Mr. George William Wildebore,
B.R.S. depot manager, denied that he had ever asked men to work longer than the legal number of hours, and that he had asked drivers to falsify log sheets. Mr. P. Moore, prosecuting. thought that Parkinson was "throwing as much mud" as he could at Mr. Wildebore hoping that it would exculpate himself. Parkinson denied this,