The ink on the page of my last post about the new softer, gentler approach to tax collection was not yet dry when Israel's main financial daily ran a banner headline concerning the upcoming automatic exchange of information between tax authorities. The wording was a rather unimaginative: ' A flood of requests from foreign banks…
Fishy business
Among the moral influences on my childhood, and that of my fellow English countrykids, was Hilaire Belloc's 'Cautionary Tales for Children'. Entering the Land of Nod at night to the story of Jim who ran away from his nurse and was eaten by a lion, or Matilda who said lies and was burnt to death,…
Bog standard (almost)
Charles Dickens's fecund imagination allowed Pip's benefactor Magwitch to return to England from transportation to an Australian penal colony, albeit at risk of judicial execution. By all accounts, thanks to the triple-knot of location, location, location, escape for real-life transportees wasn't all that simple. What the desperate convicts of the nineteenth century needed was the…
Tell it like it is
A rose by any other name would smell as sweet'. That quote from Romeo and Juliet has occupied my thoughts this last week. As an Israeli judge found recently, the concept is only a 'truth universally acknowledged' to the extent the rose is inarguably a rose. And, in the process, the learned gentleman took pains…
Ain’t no Bonanza
Jay Leno once went walkabout in New York asking innocent passers-by if they could name a country beginning with the letter 'U'. Apart from the usual camera induced deer-in-the-headlights non-responses, a few bright sparks came up with Uganda and Uruguay. At the close of the piece, as the camera faded out, Leno was heard asking:…
Monkey business
In its relentless efforts to clean us all up, the Israeli Tax Authority has just thrown another spanner in the works of the well-greased black market. Meek householders faced by odd-job men demanding cash as they flex their bulging muscles, not to mention seasoned mafiosi and disgraced politicians, will be questioning my timing. Surely, the…
Embrace the Model Treaty
When wheelchair bound 'Ironside' star Raymond Burr walked confidently down the aircraft steps at Lod Airport in 1974, the reaction of the Israeli public was something akin to the second coming. Still caught in the long shadow of the Yom Kippur War, Israelis were far closer to Tom Brokaw's 'Greatest Generation' than consumerist 1970s Western…
Keep Calm and Carry On
The British have always been a supremely pragmatic people. It was thanks to a fickle king that they knocked religious hegemony on the head early on, and thanks to another misguided monarch that they got their revolution out of the way before the Rousseaus, Marxes and Engels of the world could fill the vacuum with…
It could have been 1984
A career in tax really does necessitate a command of numbers. You never know when they are going to unexpectedly turn up and try to bend your mind. Many years ago, I was asked if I could assist an independent contractor with a spot of number bother with the Israeli tax authorities. I couldn't. An…
Telling it like it isn’t
A rabbi, a priest and the secretary-general of the OECD walk into a bar... Not heard that one before? Read on. Last Wednesday, January 2nd, as the 20th Knesset breathed its last before flatlining in the run-up to a General Election, the Finance Committee approved regulations paving the way for the introduction of the international…
Tax Break 