see the effective pom of your project either on the command line by typing mvn help:effective-pom or through eclipse effective-pom view of your pom. That will give you the true configuration. If the flag is set to true, then:
- are you adding the configuration in an inactive profile? check mvn help:active-profiles
- do you have pom inheritance and inheriting the configuration from the parents? check parent poms
I don't think that changing the version will help you much as the "skip" parameter was available from version 2.5