Yorkshire fraudster businesswoman has assets confiscated after failing to argue £260,000 house was worth less than it is

Sally Woodhead, 55, described as a “thoroughly dishonest woman”, was jailed for two years in May for a five-year, £100,000-plus tax fraud after failing to declare income from her lucrative, Scarborough-based cleaning business.

Woodhead, of Foxholes, Driffield, was charged with evading income tax worth £177,117 but pleaded guilty to fraudulent evasion on the basis that it was £100,000 which the prosecution ultimately accepted for sentencing purposes.

Today she was back in the dock at York Crown Court to face financial confiscation proceedings following a painstaking forensic analysis of her accounts and assets.

Prosecutor Simon Clegg said that Woodhead owned two properties - a semi-detached house in Driffield worth about £260,000 and another on which she had quite substantial equity.

Woodhead - one of whose main clients was a leading holiday park in the Scarborough area which paid over £1.7million for her cleaning services between 2010 and 2016 - claimed the Driffield property was worth much less but couldn’t provide any supporting evidence to prove this.

She also contested financial experts’ valuations of her tax liabilities and revenues, despite having already admitted the fraud.

Although Woodhead was charged with tax evasion worth £177,117 and sentenced on the revised figure of £100,000, the prosecution said they would not be bound by these figures when it came to financial confiscation because of the increased value of her assets, namely her properties.

Mr Clegg asked the judge to set a confiscation amount based on the higher unpaid tax liability, as set out by a government fraud investigator, in addition to the subsequent uplift in the value of her houses.

He said that Woodhead - who was now in poor health, on benefits and had “very little, if any” money in her bank account - was the sole owner of the two properties worth a combined £292,366.

Judge Simon Hickey said he “unhesitatingly” agreed with the fraud investigator’s figures and those put forward by the prosecution relating to Woodhead’s assets.

He accordingly made a confiscation order for just over £216,110 and told Woodhead she had three months to pay. If she doesn’t make the payment on time, she could be facing another 18 months in jail.

Mr Hickey said that Woodhead had “failed on a number of occasions” to co-operate with the court and the investigation into her assets and liabilities.

At the sentence hearing in May, the court heard that Woodhead had run her then thriving cleaning business from 2010 but failed to file any tax returns or pay National Insurance between 2011 and 2016, when she was earning “substantial” sums from the business.

She admitted one count of fraudulent evasion of income tax by failing to notify HM Revenue & Customs of her earnings. Two other fraud allegations, including failing to declare income to obtain tax-credit payments and VAT fraud, were allowed to lie on court file.

Mr Clegg said that Woodhead’s apparent prosperity at the time of the offences could be gauged by a mortgage application she made prior to the fraud when she declared an annual income of £55,000.

She had two previous convictions for fraud, namely obtaining property by deception in the 1990s. She also had a previous rap for theft and a conviction for animal cruelty from 2000.

The two-year jail term she received triggered her immediate release from custody because of the amount of time she had spent on remand.