In Tudor times it was traditional for condemned gentlemen to pay their own executioner. The equivalent in my world is the statutory requirement to report any of a series of positions taken in a tax return that the tax authorities do not agree with. The tax inspector no longer needs the deductive powers of a gumshoe – he or she can just sit in the comfort of their torture chamber picking their victims off one by one. The good news is that you need to be making quite a packet from your planning to be forced to the block – 5 million shekels in the current year or 10 million shekels over 4 years. The bad news is that there are 57 varieties (or positions) to choose from.

Although the list came out in December last year, the form for reporting – which is just really an index of the December headings, and could have been put together in half one of the many hours saved investigating – finally hit the presses earlier this month, just in time for some to miss the filing date of their  tax returns. What is most interesting is that most of the ‘positions’ could better be described as the ‘law’. The tax authorities seem to have taken a leaf out of US Immigration and Customs Enforcement‘s book: ‘Do you seek to engage in or have you ever engaged in terrorist activities, espionage, sabotage, or genocide?’ Like someone is going to announce they have been evading tax.

However, one that caught my eye concerned the profit to be reported on the sale of trust assets. The pronouncement by the authorities (already back in 2017) was not controversial – the sale of an asset that had started life outside the Israeli tax net was subject to capital gains tax on the full gain – painful, but common international practice (and the clear law). The explanatory notes, however, included an exception relating to ‘Relatives Trusts’.  When the legislature took its last swing of the axe at trust tax planning in 2013 making everything taxable, there was one small sweetener. While distributions to Israeli beneficiaries would face a tax bill, Ma and Pa who had set up trusts in the obscure faraway lands where they still lived, would – together with their trustees – be largely let off the hook from reporting in years when distributions were not made (unless they chose otherwise). The explanatory notes spread the bonhomie further by making clear that relatives trusts set up before 2003 would get a step-up in value for capital gains tax purposes to January 1 of that year. The explantory notes were cross-referenced to the tax authority’s notes on the trust law. The only problem was, they didn’t fit. Where did 2003 come from? In fact, what the blazes did 2003 have to do with trusts at all – It was the one area actively ignored in the great tax reform of that year. The explanatory notes were silent.

But, if we are already talking about relatives trusts, there is sadly no happy ending. The authorities were nice to Ma and Pa. They even decided not to mess things up until not one, but both, of them were safely tucked up in their faraway graves. Then the fun would start. A relatives trust would become an Israeli resident trust – facing full taxation even of the bits heading to foreign siblings. While there were regulations offering solutions (potentially painful) for trusts to carve out foreign beneficiaries’ income from the Israeli tax system, the wording didn’t comfortably include relatives trusts which started life as something statutorily amorphous.

So, as with so much in Israeli tax law, assessees grieving their parents now find themselves at the mercy of the tax authority. In fairness, the authorities do their best to produce a sharp result from blunt legislation. But it can take a lot longer than a Tudor treason trial.

Relatives trusts need tender loving care if their beneficiaries are to avoid the ignominy of the scaffold.