A greedy Indian immigrant NDIS provider who illegally obtained the personal details of almost 20,000 disabled people so he could chase them as clients has avoided jail.
Amit Sharma, 46, previously pleaded guilty to three counts of soliciting disclosure of protected agency information and appeared in Parramatta District Court on Tuesday for sentencing by Judge Nanette Williams, who said he had formed a “criminal enterprise” with friend and co-offender Leena Kumar, 50.
Judge Williams found that Sharma’s offending was “planned, it was thought out, it was repeated, it was targeted”, but gave him a sentence of 14 months’ imprisonment to be served in the community, 90 hours of community work, and a $1,850 fine, National News Network reported.
The judge found Sharma was “genuinely remorseful” and was unlikely to reoffend, but the relative of one of his participants, Cindy Bond, broke down in tears when the sentence was read out.
“He gets to do his sentence in a multimillion dollar mansion. The $1850 fine is a joke. The man is a grub,” she said.
“I was a trusted and valued member of the local Indian community … I am committed to rebuilding that trust,” Sharma said in a letter to the court, 7 News reported.
He also said he hoped to learn from his mistakes, and mentioned that he and his wife often made food for the homeless and that he was a multicultural ambassador for the Commonwealth Games.
Sharma now operates a call centre in India, works as a travel agent, and lives in a six-bedroom Sydney mansion worth $3 million.
The court previously heard Sharma solicited personal information including names, addresses, genders, and birth dates of 18,500 disabled people on the National Disability Insurance Scheme from Kumar, a National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) employee.
Kumar was given a suspended sentence in May 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 was not part of the criminal proceedings, although she is permanently banned from the scheme along with her husband.
Sharma, who moved to Australia from the city of Indore, 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.
NDIA acting CEO Scott McNaughton said Sharma and his businesses had been banned from the NDIS for life, and that the agency was constantly improving privacy protections for particpants.
“We have strengthened our safeguards, tightened access controls and expanded monitoring to ensure participant information is protected at every stage,” Mr McNaughton said.
“We have zero tolerance for any misuse of participant data and will act swiftly, like we did in this matter, against anyone who seeks to exploit participants and the Scheme.”
Header image: Left, Amit Sharma (7 News). Right, Sharma and wife Nikita Patel (Facebook).
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