Following a seizure conducted in good faith of documents of the taxpayer pursuant to s. 231.3 of the Act, that provision was found in the Baron case to be unconstitutional. The Department officials, after having unsuccessfully tried to obtain a further warrant, had agreed to return the documents in question to the taxpayer's law firm. The officials then "concocted a scheme whereby they would not really return the documents but would hand them over temporarily and then reseize them immediately pursuant to a new legal warrant" (which they obtained without informing the Court of the relevant circumstances).
At issue were reassessments of the taxpayer for unreported income. Although the conduct of the officials was "not so 'flagrant and egregious' as to support the extreme remedy of vacating these reassessments in light of the minimal importance of the additional evidence obtained by these violations" (p. 6344), the Department was directed to exclude from the reassessments the amount of additional unreported income discovered as a result of the second seizure. Linden J.A. had previously noted (at p. 6342) that "the use of tainted evidence in a criminal proceeding is a much more serious matter than in a civil proceeding".