Court rejects Barrie Skinner and David Rowley's last-chance appeal

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.

A panel of five Supreme Court judges rejected that argument unanimously, holding that s109 "does not apply in criminal proceedings".

The pair were jailed for eight and a half years in August 2012 on frauds that netted them some $2 million and involved filing false tax returns on behalf of their clients where they claimed fake expenses in excess of $9 million and were also found guilty of attempting to pervert the course of justice.