The Supreme Court rejected the appeal by Barrie Skinner and David Rowley, who had sought to have the court recognise that their personal tax returns.
Two Wellington accountants serving prison terms on 110 counts of tax fraud have exhausted the last avenue of appeal against their convictions.
The Supreme Court rejected the appeal by Barrie Skinner and David Rowley, who had sought to have the court recognise that their personal tax returns between 2006 and
2010 should be deemed to have been correct under section 109 of the Tax Administration Act.
Some of the 110 charges on which they were convicted included allegations that they had knowingly provided false information to the Inland Revenue Department in their tax returns for those years.
The pair attempted to argue that under s109, "certain decisions of the Commissioner of Inland Revenue are deemed correct in a court or in any proceedings, including an assessment of income tax".
This could have seen the tax returns in question "deemed correct" by the court. That and other arguments failed in the Court of Appeal, but Skinner and Rowley were granted leave to appeal to the Supreme Court on the s109 issue.
