Man to do tax fraud jail time

A MAREEBA businessman will spend Christmas in jail after a jury found him guilty of tax fraud.

Voli Della Bosca under-reported $173,819 to the Australian Taxation Office between the 2009 to 2013 financial years.

Now the 61-year-old will spend four months of a twoyear imprisonment sentence behind bars.

He had declared $84,158 in PAYG tax withheld, while his employee tax returns showed that $257,977 had been withheld from their wages.

Della Bosca had pleaded not guilty in the Cairns District Court to dishonestly causing a risk of loss to the Commonwealth.

The jury was told that the case had been built on a comparison between handwritten pay slips and other documents submitted to the ATO.

“The jury found that you had acted dishonestly, rejecting the claim that it was simply bad record keeping,” Judge Leanne Clare SC said.

“There was a high level of reporting of tax withheld.”

Judge Clare said that Della Bosca’s decision to take steps including an increase in reporting following an audit “in my view reflects a desire to protect yourself from the consequences of the dishonest reporting”.

“All of the discrepancies in the reporting significantly favoured your companies,” she said. “The very strong inference is that you deliberately adopted a course of dishonest conduct for the entire period and that is reinforced by the scale, the persistence and the amount.”

Judge Clare accepted that Della Bosca wanted to keep his companies afloat in light of cashflow issues.

“You said you didn’t have the money to repay the tax withheld but you did continue trading in one form or another ... and you also expanded,” she said.

The maximum penalty five years.

“This is not the worst category of offending but it still is a serious example,” Judge Clare said. “Conduct like this requires a lengthy investigation and ... tends to undermine confidence in the integrity of a fair taxation system.”

Della Bosca will be released on a $2000 three-year good behaviour bond.

THE JURY FOUND THAT YOU HAD ACTED DISHONESTLY, REJECTING THE CLAIM THAT IT WAS SIMPLY BAD RECORD KEEPING JUDGE LEANNE CLARE SC

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