An Indian immigrant faces jail for illegally obtaining the personal details of almost 20,000 disabled people in order to obtain them as clients for his NDIS business.
Amit Sharma, who moved to Australia from the city of Indore and lived in a six bedroom home in the Sydney suburb of Carlingford, appeared in Parramatta District Court for sentencing on Monday after previously pleading guilty to three counts of soliciting disclosure of protected agency information.
The court heard that Sharma solicited personal information including names, addresses, genders, and birth dates of 18,500 disabled people on the National Disability Insurance Scheme from friend and National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) employee Leena Kumar, National News Network reported.
Kumar, 50, was last month given a suspended sentence for leaking the details of 43,000 NDIS participants to Sharma and his wife Nikita Patel over a 20-month period beginning in 2021.
Ms Patel has not been charged with any offences, is not accused of any wrongdoing, and is not part of the criminal proceedings, although she is permanently banned from the scheme along with her husband.
Prosecutor Rowan O’Donnell told the court Sharma solicited the details of NDIS participants in specific postcodes in NSW and Adelaide from Kumar by text message, saying “18,500 participants was a very significant number given that the purpose of offending was financial greed”.
Sharma’s lawyer Emmanuel Kerkyasharian told the court his client admitted he acted out of “greed”, but said there was no evidence presented that Sharma had benefited financially from obtaining the leaked information.
He further described his client as a “pillar of the community” and a “model citizen”, and said he was at low risk of reoffending. Sharma now operates a call centre in India and works as a travel agent.
Judge Nanette Williams noted that the leak would have been “very distressing” for affected participants and that prosecutors were seeking a custodial sentence, but adjourned her judgement until August 22.
Sharma was arrested and charged by the NDIA-run Fraud Fusion Taskforce (FFT), which was set up to investigate fraud in the NDIS in 2022. Since then there have been 20 successful prosecutions, including Sharma’s, 14 of which have resulted in jail sentences.
FFT investigators warned in January that the scale of NDIS fraud was far larger than previously feared, with scammers and Middle Eastern crime gangs stealing billions from the scheme every year.
Header image: Left, Amit Sharma and Nikita Patel. Right, Leena Kumar (Facebook, Instagram).
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