A company director and former House of Keys candidate has been ordered to pay £5,000 to the Association of Chartered Certified Accountants after admitting to VAT fraud.

Richard Ian Kissack, a qualified accountant and owner of Ambitions recruitment agency, admitted VAT fraud totalling £190,000 and was sentenced to 22 months, suspended for two years, in May 2021.

He was then jailed in September 2021 after appeal judges ruled his suspended sentence was too lenient.

Mr Kissack has multiple allegations levelled against him including the fraudulent evasion of VAT and making statements which he knew to be false in a VAT return.

His membership at the ACCA has also been removed.

In court, he admitted nine specimen charges relating to 27 falsified VAT returns and was sentenced to immediate custody for 13 months on the first charge, and six months on each subsequent charge, to run concurrently.

Delivering judgment, Jeremy Storey QC and Deemster Alistair Montgomerie had said the sentence was ‘flawed because [Deemster Graeme Cook] took into account irrelevant factors and failed to have regard to the need to impose a deterrent sentence’.

He said: ‘The loss of employment by the defendant’s wife and 2.5 other employees and/or an ability to repay the VAT by the defendant continuing to work are not proper reasons for keeping the defendant out of prison.’

They added there would be serious questions over Ambitions' future even with the defendant, as the business would be ‘tainted’, so the employees could be out of work in any event, and that Kissack’s family would be just as likely to lose their current home to pay back the VAT if Kissack remained free.

After Ambitions had been notified of a VAT inspection, Kissack wrote to Customs and Excise accepting ‘historical errors’ had been made in 27 VAT returns, resulting in underpayments of £190,536. The appeal judges agreed the entries were not errors but deliberate falsifications.

Read about Kissack's admission of fraud in 2020 here.