A FORMER lawyer who allegedly inflated his monthly salary on a payroll statement from $25,000 to $65,000 to get more money from a new employer, is now on trial for forgery.

After Rudy Lim, 37, moved from international law firm DLAS to Duane Morris LLP in January 2007, DLAS employees going through the work he had done found the forged payroll statement in the electronic records stored in the firm's computer server.

The Commercial Affairs Department was called in, and Lim quit Duane Morris in May 2007 when the officers started looking into what he had done. But by then, his ploy had already paid off. Lim's last drawn salary at Duane Morris was $58,200 a month - significantly higher than the $25,000 he had received at DLAS.

The details emerged in a district court on Monday on the first day of Lim's hearing.

Lim does not deny creating the false payroll statement, but his lawyer, Mr Bernard Doray, is expected to argue that it was not an offence at that time to forge an electronic document.

The payroll statement was sent electronically and no hard copy was printed out. Lim's defence is likely to centre on how the law was amended to include the forgery of electronic documents or soft copies as a criminal offence only in April 2007 - more than four months after he created the payroll statement.

Read the full story in Tuesday's edition of The Straits Times.