A 37-year-old woman, who was convicted of two counts of tax evasion on May 28 after claiming her dead father as a dependent, has had her four-week prison sentence suspended for 18 months. Hong Kong’s High Court decided yesterday that since the woman is pregnant and due on Oct. 29, it was appropriate on “humanitarian grounds to suspend her sentence and impose fines.
The woman had declared her father has a dependent in her tax returns for 2010-2011 and 2011-2012. There was just one tiny little detail: he died in Feb. 2010. The total amount of tax she evaded was HKD22,440, with her claims totalling HKD132,000.
She will be fined HKD7,000 for each of her two charges, a total of HKD14,000. The maximum penalty is three years’ imprisonment and a fine of HKD50,000, plus a fine of three times the amount of tax evaded. We get that she’s pregnant, but it still seems she got off easy…
Photo: Jacklee via Wikimedia
