Richard Hatch once made himself comfortable in the wilds of Borneo. It's looking like he's going to have to try and do the same within the confines of the West Virginia prison he's called home for the past four months.

His attempt to have his conviction on tax-evasion charges overturned hit a roadblock Friday when prosecutors advised a federal appeals court to uphold the original judgment, saying Hatch had his chance to testify on his own behalf but failed to capitalize on the opportunity.

The first-season Survivor champ has maintained that he didn't pay taxes on his $1 million grand prize because he thought that the show's producers were going to foot the bill. Hatch's legal camp has alleged that the Rhode Island native caught show staffers smuggling food to various contestants during the taping, after which producers arranged the monetary deal in exchange for Hatch's silence.

Hatch filed his appeal with the 1st U.S. Circuit Court last month, claiming that U.S. District Judge Ernest Torres, who oversaw Hatch's trial, improperly prevented him from broaching the topic of cheating in his testimony, leaving him only able to assert that he had thought producers were going to pay his taxes for him.

Which, on its own, evidently didn't impress either judge or jury that much. Hatch was convicted on three of the 10 counts laid out in the indictment against him, and Torres doled out a relatively harsh punishment, saying he felt Hatch both had no remorse for trying to cheat the IRS and had repeatedly perjured himself on the stand.

In a brief filed Friday, federal prosecutors stated that Torres told Hatch's attorney, Michael Minns, that he could, in fact, present evidence as to why Hatch supposedly believed the Survivor producers were going to take care of his taxes, and that Minns was the one who chose not to question his client about it on the stand.

"What the court was unwilling to tolerate was a sideshow concerning whether the producers helped other contestants cheat, divorced from the key defense predicate: that this had all led to the alleged promise," prosecutors wrote. "Counsel's failure cannot be transformed into an abuse of discretion by the court."

CBS, meanwhile, has denied that any cheating went on among the Survivor crew. Series creator Mark Burnett, the producer who Hatch says brokered the deal, testified during the trial that all contestants signed contracts acknowledging that they were responsible for paying their own income taxes.

Prosecutors also pointed out in their brief Friday that Minn opted not to question Burnett about the alleged arrangement, either.

Hatch was convicted of evading taxes on his Survivor winnings, as well as on $327,000 he earned cohosting a Boston radio program and $28,000 in rent he collected from property he owned. He was cleared on seven charges of bank, mail and wire fraud.

After he was sentenced last May, Hatch, 45, did a short stint in solitary at a Massachusetts correctional facility and then was shipped off to a federal lockup in Oklahoma. In early August he was transferred to the minimum-security Robert F. Kennedy Federal Correctional Center in Morgantown, West Virginia.