A former civil servant and his wife are today beginning eight year and six year jail sentences respectively for pocketing vast amounts of taxpayers’ money.Kyril Burrows, 48, and Delcina Bean-Burrows, 49, were ordered to pay the $526,833.81 that they stole back within two years, or face an extra two years behind bars.The pair were convicted in May of 34 charges, following a three month trial.Prosecutor Susan Mulligan described the crime as one motivated by “sheer, unadulterated greed and pride. They wanted the biggest, best house, they wanted to be considered as a certain type of people in the community”.Jailing them, Puisne Judge Charles-Etta Simmons said they showed “totally dishonest disregard for the rules that bind all right-thinking reasonable and law-abiding residents of this Island”.Burrows, an architect, abused his position as buildings manager at the Ministry of Works and Engineering to commit the crime. He worked with his wife to misappropriate the funds over the period January 1, 2005 and December 31, 2009.Burrows forged numerous invoices in order to get Government to pay for renovations to the private home the couple shared in Turkey Hill, St George’s and buy three large television sets.The couple also worked together to funnel taxpayers’ cash to Bean-Burrows’ companies Ren Tech and Theravisions for work they should never have been paid for.Burrows quit his job in 2008 after managers discovered he had used taxpayers’ money to buy a 58-inch plasma screen television.He left stacks of payment-related documents behind at his former workplace, Prospect Depot. When the documents were uncovered by staff during a clear-out at the depot, alarm bells went off over the fraud.He and his wife were arrested, and later charged with the crimes at Magistrates’ Court in March 2011.They maintain their innocence in respect of all the charges they were convicted of, and showed no visible emotion as they were sent to the cells.Burrows declined an invitation to address the court. Bean-Burrows, who is an occupational therapist, told the judge: “I would like to say that apart from the pain and heartache that this case has caused our family, I am very very sorry for the bad light that the case has brought on the civil service.”She added: “I also recognise that the Bermudian taxpayers, because of the guilty verdicts, are aggrieved and I would like to apologise to them for the grievances that they have in respect to this particular case.”During the sentencing, Ms Mulligan noted how Burrows methodically altered documents over the course of several years to perpetrate the crime.She pointed out that he paid no heed to the contractors whose businesses and reputations were put at risk by him falsifying the invoices they sent to him. Neither, she said, did he show concern for the civil servants who trusted him enough to sign off on the payments.She reminded the judge how the couple were caught being untruthful when speaking about procedural matters during the trial, such as collecting documents from prosecutors.And she highlighted how they presented allegedly false documents to witnesses in a bid to bolster their defence.Ms Mulligan further noted how Bean-Burrows was charged and given a conditional discharge at Magistrates’ Court for abusing two prosecutors, who she called “b*ches” during the run-up to the trial.She said the couple displayed “their utter lack of remorse, lack of insight, their lack of any acceptable moral code.”The defendants represented themselves during their trial, claiming they could not afford a lawyer. However, they were represented during the sentencing hearing by Saul Froomkin QC.He urged the judge to keep the jail sentences to a minimum, saying that each year they spend behind bars will cost the taxpayer another $85,000.“That makes no sense. All they’re going to be doing is sitting around,” he said, arguing that they ought to be able to use their education and skills to benefit the community as part of their punishment.However, the judge said the sentences of six years for Bean-Burrows and eight for Burrows must be long enough to deter other civil servants from committing similar crimes.“There has been a loss of public confidence in the Accountant General’s Department as a result of what was revealed in this case, in the civil service and in the Government in general,” she noted.The couple have children aged 14 and 16, who are now being cared for by Mr Burrows’s parents.