KEY POINTS:
It will take 93 years for a Papamoa woman to repay almost $100,000 she stole through benefit fraud, a court has heard.
Hazel Mary Webster, a 46-year-old housewife, was yesterday sentenced to two years in prison for illegally claiming the domestic purposes benefit for almost 10 years.
Her sentence was deferred and she was released on bail after the Tauranga District Court granted her two months' leave to apply for home detention.
Webster accumulated about $97,200 over nine years and eight months by repeatedly lying on annual benefit review forms and in interviews with social services.
She said she was separated from her husband and single when in fact she and her husband had reconciled less than five months after she first applied for the DPB in April 1996.
Her husband, Peter Webster, is now repaying - at $20 a week - the money she fraudulently received.
Judge Peter Rollo calculated that it would take 93 years for the debt to be repaid and said Hazel Webster's offending was in the worst category of benefit fraud. "For almost 10 years, every fortnight you would have received a benefit you knew you were no longer eligible for."
He condemned her actions, saying she had many chances to come clean and that benefit fraud was "theft from the community and selfish".
It was "an easy offence to commit and a difficult offence to detect".
Her lawyer, Craig Tuck, argued that Webster was an "absolutely exceptional" caregiver, saying she had not kept the money for herself but dispersed it among whanau.
"It seems to have all gone into supporting her children and grandchildren," he said.
But Judge Rollo replied: "Model parents do not steal for almost a 10-year period from the community they live in."
Ministry of Social Development prosecutor Tony Cicolini asked for three years' jail for Webster, saying her husband had been in full-time employment and earning about $700 a week when she committed the fraud.
"This was not a need situation. This was a greed situation," he said.
The judge agreed but discounted the sentence by a third because Webster had no previous convictions.
She had pleaded guilty to one charge of wilful omission and 11 charges of using a document for pecuniary advantages.
She faced maximum penalties of $5000 and 12 months in prison for the wilful omission charge (under the Social Security Act), and seven years in prison for the document charges (under the Crimes Act).
Webster was one of two Papamoa women charged with DPB fraud who appeared in the court yesterday.
Tracy Lorraine Coker, 33, also fraudulently claimed she was single and received $37,120 in DPB payments and supplementary benefits between May 2004 and July last year.
She was convicted of one charge of wilful omission and six charges of making a false statement, and appears for sentencing on July 3.
The ministry's national manager of benefit control, Joan McQuay, said some women were reluctant to disclose they were no longer single because they feared they would lose their DPB, but she encouraged them to do so because money is available for anyone struggling financially.
