An Auckland man named Gurwinder Singh, who ran a pizza outlet called Just Pizza in Waiuku, has become the first person in the country to be convicted and sentenced for aiding his company’s possession of electronic devices used to evade tax assessments and payments.
On July 15, Singh was sentenced in the Manukau District Court to seven months of home detention for tax evasion and for aiding his company in possessing electronic sales suppression tools (ESST).
Searches were conducted at both his residence and business. Bank records were also obtained, and during questioning, Singh confessed to concealing income from his tax agent to reduce his tax liability.
According to former employees, the outlet had four staff, including Singh. However, PAYE filings listed only two employees.
The total GST discrepancy resulting from the offence amounted to $78,777.09, the income tax discrepancy to nearly $100,000, and the PAYE discrepancy to $21,337.
Inland Revenue said Singh’s actions were deliberate, premeditated, and involved sustained financial deception.
“There’s no other purpose to ESST other than to facilitate tax evasion or money laundering. They’re being used globally to systematically alter point-of-sale data collected to understate or completely conceal revenue to evade tax,” Inland Revenue said in a media release.
“ESST works by targeting the integrity of transactions, software, internal memory, external filing, or reporting to delete, change, or simply not record selected sales data and transactions.”
The judge ordered the start date of the sentence be deferred until 20 August to allow Singh to travel to Fiji for family funerals.
This sentence is the first of its kind since April 2022, when New Zealand enacted laws criminalising the acquisition or possession of ESST.