Failure to attend, answer questions or nominate representative
476 Failure to attend, answer questions or nominate representative
This section applies if—
an authorised person requires a person under section 465 to—
answer a question; or
if the person is a corporation—nominate an executive officer or employee of the corporation to answer a question as the corporation’s representative; or
attend a stated reasonable place at a stated reasonable time, to answer questions; but
section 473 does not apply.
The person must comply with the requirement, unless the person has a reasonable excuse for not complying with it.Maximum penalty—50 penalty units.
For subsection (2), it is not a reasonable excuse for an individual to fail to answer a question that complying with the requirement might tend to incriminate the individual.
However, incriminating evidence for an individual who answers a question is not admissible in evidence against the individual in a civil or criminal proceeding, other than a proceeding for an offence for which the falsity or misleading nature of the answer is relevant.
The person does not commit an offence against this section if the information sought by the authorised person is not in fact relevant to the offence.
In this section—incriminating evidence, for an individual who answers a question, means evidence of, or directly or indirectly derived from, the answer that might tend to incriminate the individual.
This Act’s bill:Explanatory memorandum
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