Lawyer struck off after claiming she worked 28 hours a day to get £69,000 bonus

A UK lawyer who claimed to have worked 28 hours a day has been struck off by her workplace after more than 17 years at the firm.

Now, any maths whizzes among you will probably be wondering exactly how she managed to work 28 hours in a day, when there's only 24 available to most of us, and more than a third of that is usually spent sleeping.

Even someone who is pulling an all-nighter, drinking copious amounts of coffee, could not work 28 hours in a day, unless they worked on a flight from Australia and made use of the time difference when they landed, which I doubt single mum Samina Ahmed was doing every day.

Despite her workplace catching on pretty quickly that she was making some criminal changes to her time sheet, she continued to cash in on bonuses that were paid for by the publicly funded Legal Aid Agency.

The mother-of-three had worked as a prison law solicitor at Tuckers Solicitors for 17 years, but between July 2021 and June 2022, she recorded time on the company's case management system, which was literally impossible.

This is the only way she would have managed 28 hours in a day (Getty Stock Image)

Ms Ahmed recorded 7,511.70 hours over 266 days, which averages out at over 28 hours per day.

And for exactly half of those 266 days (133), she claimed to have worked more than 24 hours in a single day. I wonder how she was caught.

She was warned in April 2022 after her workplace highlighted the discrepancy in hours, which she had claimed in order to claim a maximum bonus, but she showed no signs of stopping with her scheme.

Had she gotten away with it, she would have landed herself around £69,300, but she has since been let go by her workplace and recently appeared in front of a Solicitors' Disciplinary Tribunal, where she was ordered to pay £5,000.

(Tuckers Solicitors)

Her fine was reduced from nearly £50k due to her landing jobs in retail and at Wigan Council since then, with her fraudulent scheme no doubt not appearing on her CV.

The Tribunal said: "[We] found that Ms Ahmed acted dishonestly and without integrity in recording time against matters where she had not and could not have completed the work claimed.

"In so doing she had failed to uphold public trust and confidence in the profession.

"The Tribunal found that the seriousness of Ms Ahmed's dishonest conduct was at the highest level and the resulting, foreseeable harm, both to others and to the reputation of the profession, was such that the sanction of striking off the Roll was fair, reasonable and proportionate.

She has also been taken off the solicitors' roll (Getty Stock Image)

"Ms Ahmed acknowledged that she was currently employed as an apprentice with Wigan Council and that her income was higher than when she had previously been employed in the retail sector.

"She submitted, however, that her income barely covered her outgoings and that she remained in receipt of universal credit and child benefit. She was a single parent to three children.

"The Tribunal took into account Ms Ahmed's modest financial means and had regard to the case of Barnes.

"The Tribunal did not consider that Ms Ahmed was entirely unable to meet a costs order in a reasonable period; however, it considered it appropriate to reduce the total amount of costs to reflect a fair contribution, taking into account Ms Ahmed's limited means."