Once upon a time, children’s behavior was kept in check by Cautionary Tales. Something was prohibited, someone (traditionally a naughty kid) did what they were forbidden to do, and someone (the same kid) came to a sticky end. Young bedtime readers’ inclination to err was doused by bed wetting and anguished screams in the night.…
‘But he was always good to his mother,’ has been applied to more gangsters from the golden age of crime than history suggests is reasonable. ‘But he has always paid taxes,’ may not have applied to Al Capone, but it is the defense heard over the years for many upright non-taxpaying immigrants to Israel, who…
In the first half of the 19th century, criminal cases at London’s Central Criminal Court - The Old Bailey - generally lasted less than half an hour, hardly enough time for the noose to tighten around a petty thief's neck. Meanwhile, as evidenced by the fictitious Jarndyce versus Jarndyce in Bleak House, Chancery cases over…
When I studied economics around the time Americans elected their first septuagenarian president, everything was made to look simple. After decades of the complex world according to John Maynard Keynes, Milton Friedman dug up an old equation of Irving Fisher, and Monetarism and its Rational Expectations offshoot were launched at the inflation-tired leaders of the…
When it comes to morality, Value Added Tax has no claim to Kant’s categorical imperatives, nor Utilitarianism’s mission to provide the greatest happiness to the greatest number. As a regressive tax on consumption, it eats away disproportionately at the income of the poor, who spend a significantly higher proportion of their income on vatable goods…
For the last three and a half months I have felt like the protagonist in Monty Python’s ‘The Day Nothing Happened’. As the real world has been fighting to keep its COVID-19 head above water, the tax world has been treading water. A recent Israeli court case that surfaced last week, however, jolted the rose-tinted…
Charles Dickens spent much of his literary career railing against the demonic effects of 19th century bureaucracy. He could just as well have been writing today. Unfortunately, now as then, most of us obediently accept the nonsense thrown at us by the nation’s institutions, because – once solved - we don’t have the time, patience…
This year marks the 50th anniversary of the first performance of the classic satirical farce ‘Accidental Death of an Anarchist’, in which two policeman under investigation for the death of a suspect in their custody weave a web of increasingly improbable explanations as to how he fell out of the interrogation room window. I don’t…
When people refer to ‘tax evasion’, they are rarely talking about VAT. The criminal non-payment of VAT, as distinct from its elder siblings - Income Tax and Corporate Tax, is universally known as VAT Fraud. The name reflects none of the grudging respect for the brilliant wheezes of talented white collar crooks . No, sir.…
Last Sunday, the High Court clipped the wig of a first-class judge - and the tax community in general - in a landmark decision overturning a lower court’s ruling. It reminded me of the reaction I received from a tax authority official to an article I wrote at the turn of the century for a…
Tax Break 