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Bribery, brothels, breaches of confidence: ATO officer loses appeal against imprisonment A former ATO client engagement officer has lost an appeal against a five-year prison sentence for accepting a $100,000 bribe in return for a favourable tax audit.
. On 12 March 2024, former ATO client engagement officer Wenfeng Wei was sentenced to five years in prison after breaching the Commonwealth Criminal Code on multiple occasions. He accepted bribes in return for favourable audits and illegally accessed restricted ATO data on associates’ competitors in what the courts described as a “gross abuse of trust.” In May 2016, Wei was assigned to audit the taxation affairs of Raymond Schlemon and his company, Global World Group. That August, Schlemon gave Wei a $100,000 cash bribe. In return, Wei undertook the audit in a way that “significantly favoured Shlemon,” assessing him for outstanding tax liabilities of $136,290, when the audit ought to have identified income tax and GST shortfalls of just over $6 million. Wei, who also had a gambling addiction, laundered the money through casinos to provide an “ostensible source for the money,” court documents said. He also accessed restricted ATO data concerning Shlemon in an unauthorised way more than 500 times between April 2017 and February 2022. He communicated with Shlemon before, during and after these ‘episodes’ of unauthorised access. Wei engaged in similar activities relating to another associate, Chao Chang, who operated a brothel in Sydney’s Surry Hills known as The Ginza Club. The former ATO officer accessed restricted government data relating to Chang and his business interests over 900 times between August 2017 and March 2020. Furthermore, at the request of Chang, Wei accessed restricted ATO data on a competitor of Chang’s on 294 occasions. This included personal details, information regarding property transactions, shareholdings and tax returns of the competitor. The judge described this conduct as “particularly concerning because of the breach of confidence in circumstances where [the competitor] was entitled to expect that a public organisation would protect her from competitors and the gross abuse of trust involved,” court documents read. "The offending involved a gross violation of [the competitor’s] privacy as well as of the ATO system.” Wei was sentenced to five years in prison, with a non-parole period of two years and six months. The sentence commenced on 12 March 2024 and is set to expire on 11 March 2029. The former ATO officer launched an appeal against his sentence, arguing that the sentencing judge had failed to consider his “contrition and remorse,” and his sentence should be reduced as he had pleaded guilty and co-operated with authorities. Last Wednesday (24 September), the NSW Supreme Court rejected his appeal, finding that Wei’s cooperation had not warranted further reductions in his sentence, given that his early guilty plea had already resulted in a 25 per cent reduction in his sentence. In fact, the judges said that they likely would have given him a stronger sentence, given the nature of his conduct. “Were I to resentence, I too would impose a materially higher sentence for the bribery offence, even taking into account the evidence adduced on the usual basis against the possibility that this Court might resentence,” Justice Mark Leeming noted. “That is because the offending was serious and sustained, and the errors identified by the applicant are relatively minor in terms of their impact on the process of formulating the appropriate sentence.”
Emma Partis |
