The General Optical Council (GOC) has suspended West Midlands-based dispensing optician Paul Cross from its register for a period of 12 months for processing refund transactions onto his own bank card.
According to a GOC statement, Cross had believed he was entitled to recover his own expenses and payments for locum work.
Committee chair Anne Johnstone said the committee had found his conduct to be financially motivated and dishonest, adding: ‘He intended to recover such payments or expenses to which he felt entitled by intentionally representing these as transactional store refunds, a method which the committee found that he knew and accepted was not permitted.
‘The committee has accepted that the registrant genuinely believed that he was entitled to the sums that he had recovered and had not been dishonest in his financial motivation, but had used a method of recovering the money which was dishonest in the way that he had gone about it.’
Cross has until January 3 to appeal his suspension.