A Western Australian woman who forged home indemnity insurance certificates to keep a construction company running has had her prison sentence suspended on appeal, after the state's highest court found the sentencing judge got key facts wrong and imposed a term that was "plainly unjust."
The Court of Appeal of Western Australia handed down its decision on September 16, 2026, cutting the woman's total effective sentence from three years and 10 months' immediate imprisonment to two years wholly suspended.
The case centred on Western Australian Construction Pty Ltd (WAC), a building company that had been placed into "referral status" by QBE in April 2019. That restriction blocked WAC from obtaining home indemnity insurance certificates - and in Western Australia, all residential building work valued above $20,000 requires one before work can proceed.
Rather than stop taking on projects, the woman - who had become a director of WAC despite having no construction experience - arranged for a third party to produce fraudulent certificates. Those fakes were used to obtain building permits for residential developments, including a five-unit project and a separate single-dwelling build.
The offending spanned eight charges over 14 months. Four were for uttering forged records - fake HII certificates submitted with building permit applications, and a fabricated bank statement given to government investigators to throw them off the trail. Three were for gaining a benefit by fraud: two where clients paid WAC hundreds of thousands of dollars on the strength of the forged paperwork, and one where forged accounting invoices were used to extract a payment from WAC's own insurance broker. The eighth charge covered the unlawful use of a government employer's restricted computer system, at her co-offender's request, to hand over confidential client data.
The woman had pleaded guilty to all charges at the earliest opportunity. She cooperated extensively with authorities, signing a 30-page witness statement and undertaking to testify against her co-offender. She also paid approximately $180,000 in restitution - covering amounts lost by QBE and another insurer - from her own funds. She received no financial benefit from the offending and lost the $50,000 she had invested in the company.
The District Court sentenced the woman to three years and 10 months' immediate imprisonment in June 2026. But the Court of Appeal found the sentencing judge made at least three factual errors. Two were identified by the appellant and conceded by the prosecution; a third was identified by the prosecution itself. Among them: the judge attributed consequences to the offending that were actually caused by other factors, and found the woman had offended knowing about the impact of COVID-19 - when the offending in fact predated the March 2020 pandemic declaration.
The prosecution conceded the errors were material. Under the High Court's recent test in Farrugia v The King [2026] HCA 28, the question was whether the errors could realistically have affected the sentencing judge's reasoning. They could: the errors made the offending appear more serious than it was.
The Court of Appeal also took aim at the sentencing judge's approach to her reasons. Rather than setting out the facts of the case, the judge had simply "incorporated" the prosecution's statement of facts by reference - a practice the court described as one to be "deprecated." That shortcut appeared to have contributed directly to the errors.
What made this an unusual case, the court found, was the context in which the offending occurred. The woman had been in a relationship with her co-offender that was characterised by emotional manipulation, coercive control, isolation, emotional dependency and episodes of physical violence. That evidence was not challenged by the prosecution.
Psychological reports before the court linked the woman's offending to vulnerability following the deaths of her father and grandfather in 2015, after which she entered the relationship. One psychologist diagnosed post-traumatic stress disorder with major depression and anxiety, finding that her self-esteem and capacity for independent functioning had "essentially collapsed" during the relationship. A second described her as having developed increasing insight into how grief, attachment insecurity and a desire for approval had contributed to the offending.
The court accepted that the co-offender was properly regarded as the principal offender, motivated to ensure the survival of his construction company and willing to manipulate the woman to assist him.
The disparity between the two co-offenders' sentences became a significant factor on appeal. Many of the charges the woman had pleaded guilty to were never pressed against her co-offender because of witness availability issues. He ultimately pleaded guilty to a single count of fraud - equivalent to three of the charges against the woman - and received 12 months' imprisonment, wholly suspended. She got three years and 10 months, served immediately.
The sentencing judge had herself acknowledged the disconnect, telling the woman at sentencing that if the sentence could reflect "the person you are now, you wouldn't go to gaol." But the judge declined to suspend the sentence - and the Court of Appeal found she did so without properly applying the statutory test under the Sentencing Act 1995 (WA), which required her to positively determine that suspension was not appropriate before ordering immediate imprisonment.
The prosecution conceded at the appeal hearing that a suspended sentence would be appropriate. The Court of Appeal agreed, resentencing the woman to two years' imprisonment suspended for 12 months. By that point, she had already served approximately three months in custody.
The court also noted she had been separately fined $35,000 by the State Administrative Tribunal for the same underlying conduct.
The insurance dimension of the case is worth pausing on. QBE's decision to place WAC into referral status limited the company's ability to obtain HII certificates. Home indemnity insurance exists in Western Australia to protect consumers if a builder dies, disappears or becomes insolvent - exactly the scenario that later unfolded when WAC entered administration in December 2020.
By circumventing that safeguard with forged certificates, the fraud left homeowners exposed. One client's build was left incomplete and partly defective. The sentencing judge had found the consequences of using fraudulent HII certificates were "vast and wide-ranging" and undermined public confidence in the system.
The case is a practical reminder that referral restrictions and similar gatekeeping measures do their job - until they are bypassed at the document level, where verification gaps can leave insurers carrying losses they were never positioned to cover.
All charges in this case resulted in guilty pleas and convictions. The appeal concerned sentencing only. The Court of Appeal made no findings regarding the conduct of the appellant's former legal representatives.
