Anyone in employment who claims unemployment benefit runs the risk of being caught and prosecuted and may receive a fine or serve a prison sentence for that crime. Welfare fraud is a fraud on the State and is regarded as a form of blue-collar crime. White-collar crime, however, attracts less attention from the authorities.
It is more difficult to detect and prove, given a reluctance in some quarters to report it. Nevertheless where professionals, such as lawyers, seek to overcharge clients for services they have not provided, they are defrauding their clients in the same way welfare cheats defraud taxpayers.
It emerged last week that one of the two High Court taxing masters, Charles Moran, had written to both branches of the legal profession to express his concern about instances of client overcharging. The role of the Taxing Master is to assess legal costs where, following a court award, these are disputed. Mr Moran, in the course of his deliberations on costs, found a number of cases of overcharging, where junior counsel had charged "fresher fees" for court attendance despite failing to set foot in court at any stage. In addition, the solicitors who had submitted the barristers' fees for payment were fully aware of their absence from court. The Taxing Master disallowed the fees and wrote to both the Law Society and the Bar Council to complain. He reminded them of something their members should need no reminder: that they should not charge for services they had not provided.
In response the Bar Council, via its chairman Turlough O'Donnell, said it would advise members that charging a fee for a day when the barrister was not present in court was professional misconduct. The Law Society, it seems, did not choose to alert its members to Mr Moran's specific concerns. Its director-general, Ken Murphy, assured the Taxing Master that the society "would have no truck with overcharging".
The reaction of both these professional bodies does little to enhance trust in the legal profession in what has been a bad few days for the public image of solicitors and barristers. Last Tuesday, two Mayo solicitors were found guilty of a series of professional misconduct charges by the Solicitors Disciplinary Tribunal, and were fined €25,000. The Law Society had pressed for both solicitors to be struck off but the tribunal, two thirds of whose members are solicitors, settled for censure and a fine.
Given these recent revelations, the passage of a Bill to provide for the establishment of a legal services ombudsman, who will oversee the handling by the Law Society and Bar Council of complaints against solicitors and barristers, has assumed a new urgency.
