Page 2315 - Week 07 - Thursday, 17 August 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
and this amendment will mean that no document or information held by the tax office need be released to a court, even if the effect of withholding such information leads to a person being wrongly convicted of a serious criminal offence. This is unacceptable, and I would have thought that it was a breach of section 21 of our Human Rights Act. Section 21 states:
Everyone has the right to have criminal charges, and rights and obligations recognised by law, decided by a competent, independent and impartial court or tribunal after a fair and public hearing.
How can a hearing be fair if crucial documents are withheld from production at least to the court? Surely the default position should be that one person’s right to a fair trial trumps another person’s right to a total prohibition on even a limited disclosure of the details regarding their financial affairs.
There is already a number of existing privacy protections in the form of the standard prohibitions on secondary disclosure of information gained through criminal discovery processes. As noted in scrutiny report No 26, there is no general rule that excludes private information from being admissible or compellable as evidence in a criminal or civil proceeding. In most other areas of life people have to rely on these existing safeguards and I am not convinced by any arguments put forward by this government that tax records deserve special attention.
Under existing legislation, if one party does not think that it is fair that their personal information be disclosed in a court proceeding, they can apply for restricted disclosure orders so that only the court or only the parties’ legal representatives have access to the information. Alternatively, they can apply to the court for closed hearings when that information is disclosed.
These existing safeguards go a long way towards striking an appropriate balance between the right to privacy and the right to a fair trial. My amendment would further enhance this balance, by enabling the Commissioner of Taxation to disclose protected information where it is in the public interest to do so. It would also ensure that tax office documents that contain no confidential information could only be withheld from the court if it is in the public interest to do so.
Section 96 of the taxation act gives the commissioner the power to disclose statistical information only in a very narrow range of circumstances if he or she considers that it is in the public interest to do so. Section 97 gives any tax officer the power to release any information to the commissioner of police for the purposes of merely investigating an offence, but does not allow such disclosure to the court when it is dealing with a serious criminal offence.
The explanatory statement asserts that the right to a fair trial will be protected in criminal proceedings through the special disclosure obligations of the Director of Public Prosecutions. But the DPP is not listed under section 97 of the Taxation Administration Act as a person authorised to receive protected information. I also note that the chief executive is the only person to have been prescribed under section 97 (d) of the Taxation Administration Regulations to have the authority to access taxation information. This makes the claim of the explanatory statement that the DPP can release
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .