Walsh v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation [1984] HCA 33

High Court of Australia Gibbs C.J. Mason, Brennan, Deane and Dawson JJ. Walsh v Deputy Commissioner of Taxation [1984] HCA 33

ORDER Appeal dismissed with costs.

The following judgments were delivered:—

Gibbs C.J.

This is an appeal from a judgment of the Full Court of the Federal Court [1] which affirmed a judgment of Lockhart J. [2] dismissing an application to set aside a bankruptcy notice.

1. (1983) 47 A.L.R. 616; 83 A.T.C. 4,375. 2. (1982) 65 F.L.R. 87; 42 A.L.R. 727; 13 A.T.R. 40; 83 A.T.C. 4,130.

The facts of the case, which are fully set out in the judgments of Lockhart J. and the Full Court, and which it is unnecessary to repeat, reveal that the appellant carried out a scheme intended to frustrate the efforts of the Deputy Commissioner of Taxation, the present respondent, to invoke the processes of the bankruptcy law against the appellant, against whom the respondent had obtained a final judgment in the Supreme Court of New South Wales. The scheme involved the payment by the appellant of small sums of money to the credit of the respondent at his various offices throughout Australia and was designed to make it difficult for the respondent to know how much was owing under the judgment at any particular time. However, it was conceded, for the purposes of the present case, that the bankruptcy notice stated correctly the amount due by the appellant to the respondent at the time when the notice was issued, but some payments were made to the respondent on behalf of the appellant between the date of issue and the date of service of the notice. The question for decision is whether a bankruptcy notice is valid if it requires the judgment debtor to pay a sum which is in fact due at the date of issue of the notice, when the amount due under the judgment has been reduced by payments made thereafter but before the date of service. That question is an important one which must be answered as a matter of principle, regardless of the merits or lack of merits of the particular appellant.