Richard BakerDISGRACED tax inspector Richard Baker has been told to pay back almost £64,000 of his ill-gotten gains or face another two years behind bars.

The 38-year-old Inland Revenue worker siphoned off hundreds of thousands of pounds for himself over a five and-a-half-year period.

At one stage he was pocketing £200 a day and used the cash to fly to New York by Concorde and as a deposit on a house.

Now a judge has ruled that if he doesn't repay £63,909 within the next six months he will have to serve a two-year consecutive sentence.

In January Baker was jailed for three and a half years after admitting cheating the public revenue with intent to defraud between August 1997 and March 2003.

The father of three created 44 individual false identities and then proceeded to make tax repayments to himself totalling £293,334.

Having started work at the Inland Revenue as a clerical assistant in 1984, Baker rose up the ranks to the role of repayment security officer.

In his job he had to detect under-payers of income tax but instead he started paying cheques of between £5,000 and £13,000 to himself.

The first, in August 1997, was made out to Richard Baker and sent to his parents' address and 12 entirely fictitious identities were then created.

On each of the rebates he named himself as the taxpayer's nominee, sending them all to his parents' address.

After his arrest in June 2003, all of his fake identities were found listed at the back of his diary in his Swindon office.

In police interview he said he had put down a £20,000 deposit on his house, paid for an extension to it and for a Concorde flight to New York for his honeymoon with his second wife.

When Baker's bank records were examined they showed that at one stage he was withdrawing £200 a day.

Baker was back in the dock for a confiscation hearing where Judge John McNaught ruled that the benefit of his crime was £337,811 and ordered him to repay £63,909.

If he does not pay the cash within six months his jail term will be extended from three and a half years to five and a half years.

Tamash Lal