MANAGEMENT consultant Suzanne Dean cheated the taxman out of almost £100,000 by not paying the VAT or corporation tax due on her two businesses, it was alleged yesterday.

VAT returns submitted by the first of her two companies in its final year of business claimed it was 'dormant' and no tax was due - but it was still trading and receiving fees, said prosecutor Oliver Willmott at Gloucester Crown Court.

When that company, Byrnes Freeman, went bust she launched a second firm, H Consult Ltd, and that too failed to hand over VAT it had collected from clients, he alleged.

Ms Dean, formerly of Upthorpe, Cam, but now of Frombridge Lane, Whitminster, also witheld money due in corporation tax, Mr Willmott told the jury.

She has pleaded not guilty to two charges of fraudulent evasion of VAT in the period 2011 to 2014 and one charge of cheating the public revenue between March 2010 and April 2013 by failing to pay corporation tax.

Mr Willmott told the jury that Ms Dean worked as a management consultant, mainly in the healthcare field, for organisations including NHS hospital trusts, universities and charities including Marie Curie and Sue Ryder.

She was the sole director of the two companies she had set up, one after the other, to provide her services, he said.

Byrnes Freeman Ltd was registered for VAT in 2008 and went into liquidation in Sept 2013.  She then formed H Consult Ltd in 2013 and it was also registered for VAT.

At one stage, she was charging her time at £500 a day, plus VAT, and Byrnes Freeman was submitting quarterly returns and paying HMRC what was due.

But then payments to the taxman 'went off the cliff' and she paid 'absolutely nothing at all,' said Mr Willmott. Returns were submitted showing zero activity.

HMRC inspectors checked the company's accounts and found 'there was money coming in that was not being declared' and the firm had failed to pay £30,455 in VAT from the final three quarters of 2010 and the first quarter of 2011, the prosecutor alleged.

It was 'simply a lie' for the company to say it was dormant, he said.

At the time that Byrnes Freeman was declared insolvent Ms Dean owed it money because of directors' loans she had taken from the kitty, he added.

Because she had not repaid loans from the firm it was due to pay corporation tax totalling £38,785 but had not done so.

Mr Willmott said H Consult Ltd 'rose like a Phoenix from the ashes' of the first company but no VAT returns were made and the total loss to the taxman from that firm was £26,215.

"It was the same sort of fraud that was going on at Byrnes Freeman," he alleged. "She was saying the firm was not yet trading but we say it was."

Mr Willmott told the jury that most of the facts in the case were agreed between prosecution and defence - but what was not agreed was that Ms Dean had acted dishonestly.

The jury heard that her defence case is she may have been inept or 'not entirely savvy' in her tax affairs but she was not dishonest.

One of the reasons VAT returns were not submitted in the later dates was that she had changed her whole method of charging for her services, her lawyers said.

Her case was that she entered into a self-billing system and simply had to submit time sheets for payment and she assumed that the VAT was being dealt with by her clients, they said.

It was also part of her defence case that she left the financial side of the business to her then partner Craig Buckland and trusted him to submit returns.

The trial continues.