Adelaide SMSF advisor sentenced to seven years for theft from clients
Former super fund accounting manager Jason Poser has been sentenced to seven years in prison for the misappropriation of more than $2 million from company clients to fund a gambling habit.
Poser was handed the sentence in the Adelaide District Court for 34 counts of aggravated theft totalling $2,172,734, which he then used to place bets on Sportsbet, with his employer SuperGuardian also copping a whack.
Headquartered in South Australia, the specialist SMSF advisory business was determined by the Tax Practitioners Board (TPB) to have failed to provide an adequate level of supervision and control, resulting in several minor sanctions.
In brief, SuperGuardian has been ordered to increase its compliance training for staff, including around whistleblowing and its own and the professional body’s code of conduct; continue to review and update its procedures and policies to prevent further incidents; and provide the TPB with a six-monthly progress statement on these remedies for the next two years.
However, the ruling also noted the heavy toll of Poser’s offending on the company and its owners, and the numerous corrective actions they had taken to mitigate the damage, including the full reimbursement of stolen monies to affected clients not covered by insurance. This amounted to at least $800,000 out-of-pocket, of the some $2.9 million in total taken between 2019 to 2022.
During that time, Poser, who first joined SuperGuardian in 2006 as a teenager and had risen to manager, devised a relatively unsophisticated method of diverting ATO returns of between $20,000 and $400,000 into his own account. The anomalies were eventually uncovered by a colleague, but by then the pilfered money had been spent and lost on more than 65,000 bets placed on the Sportsbet app.
During sentencing, the judge spoke of the impact on SuperGuardian’s owners; “It’s true to say that reputations are built over a lifetime, but frequently lost in a moment. They have, understandably, been concerned for their business, their employees, their clients and for their families. Both are now faced with the challenge of re-establishing the trust they have built up over many years with their clients.”
The pair said in response: “Concerningly, activities of this nature are common and not limited to SuperGuardian or the SMSF industry, so we're pleased to see the recent interim report by the Tax Ombudsman calling for a range of ATO improvements that, if adopted, will make it difficult for fraudsters to take advantage of weaknesses that allow them to illegally direct money into their own hands.”
