Tax Break

03 Dec 2018

Bad Cumpany

‘Come, come Mr Bond’

If, like me, you have been wondering for decades what the European Parliament is there for, wonder no more. Following a recent vote, the august institution is considering setting up an investigations unit to tackle two humongous European fraud schemes named improbably ‘cum-cum’ and ‘cum-ex’. The first warning that something was afoot came in 1992, and the fan turned brown in 2017, but the wheels of power turn slowly in Strasbourg. (Or was it Brussels? Or Luxembourg?)

For those without a Latin education, the schemes translate as ‘with-with’ and ‘with-without’. It would be nice to leave it at that, but I had better explain.

Both schemes revolve around dividends on stocks. A stock is cum-dividend when a securities buyer is destined to receive a dividend that a company has declared but not paid. That is the status quo (more Latin) until the date at which the stock trades ex-dividend – when the dividend will go to the seller. Thanks to lacunae (Latin noun – first declension nominative plural, like mensa/mensae) especially in German law, but evidently in about ten other European jurisdictions, bankers and the other usual suspects were (possibly still are) able to bleed national treasuries of scarcely imaginable sums.

The cum-cum smacks more of an old-style tax avoidance scheme than hardcore evasion. Stocks of German companies held by foreigners who were not eligible to dividend witholding tax exemption were ‘lent’ (effectively sold with an agreement to repurchase , – but it isn’t written that way) to bona fide German banks shortly before a payment date. The stock went back at a lower price without the dividend. Naughty, but with loud protests that it only made hay while the legislators slept. There was one exemption, and the bank had a technical right to it.

He knew how to make sure a secret was kept

Cum-ex was a far dodgier form of exploitation, which did not rely on foreigners. It did, however, require collusion and, on the grounds that ‘two people can keep a secret as long as one of them is dead’, it was bound to be found out eventually (having said which, the German and other authorities seem to have made gargantuan efforts to miss what was going on beneath their noses). Basically, a bank would ‘borrow’ stocks cum-dividend within two days of the dividend payment date and would sell them (short) to a third party. Delivery was required in two days, by which time the stock had gone ex-dividend. The procedure in force until 2011 in Germany (and heaven knows what is still happening elsewhere) was that the bank had to make a compensatory transfer between the seller and the buyer for the net after-tax amount of the dividend, and then issue a certificate of withholding to the buyer even though he did not actually receive the dividend. The theory went that the seller would no longer be entitled to that withholding as he had transferred the dividend amount to the buyer, and therefore would not receive a withholding certificate. Aye, and there’s the rub. The short seller of the stock was not the ultimate owner and had not suffered the withholding tax. The ultimate owner also received a witholding tax certificate (if handled correctly, the number of withholding tax certificates could be multiplied) enabling two or more ‘owners’ to cash in on the same tax benefit. This is not clever tax avoidance. It is clearly tax evasion. And it has cost European state coffers an estimated €60 billion.

The words ‘company’ and ‘companion’ derived from the Latin ‘cum panis’ – with bread

But, at least we know we can now sleep safe at night in the knowledge that the European Parliament is on to it. It has only taken them 26 years. Rumour has it that MEPs are soon to issue a communique announcing the end of the Second World War. The suspense is killing.

Posted in European Union, Germany and tagged European Parliament, Germany, humor, humour, Tax fraud | Leave a comment

25 Nov 2018

Before our very eyes!

The Ten Commandments weren’t supposed to be easy

When it comes to aphorisms, ‘Oldie but Goodie’ is high on my list of suspect examples. Generally quoted by the generation above mine to fill the void of laughter following a particularly hackneyed joke, it only rolls happily off the tongue when served with lashings of irony.

Such was my reaction to a ruling published by the Israeli tax authorities the other day. It stumbled through a long preamble, only to mention, before things really warmed up, that it was essentially in line with another ruling from Christmas week in 2016. It begged the question: ‘ Why waste busy peoples’ time knocking out another one?’ Was it because it was so enjoyable the last time, we had to be fed it again?

Not quite.

‘Well they would, wouldn’t they?’

The new ruling, though causing no surprise to the cynics that make up the numbers in our profession, is well beyond a joke. The Man on the Clapham Omnibus would surely ask: ‘How could they?’

Well, they can, and they did, and it was obvious they would.

The ruling related to an individual who had left Israel for the US, breaking residency, and subsequently returned home. As part of his US salary package, he received options with various vesting periods. The tax authorities had to decide what part of the financial benefit from exercising the options should be taxed in Israel.

Thus far, we were in 2016 country. That ruling, based on court precedent, established that the profit earned abroad from options exercised while the individual was still abroad would not attract any tax in Israel, as it was not sourced in Israel. So far, so good. Given that information, and asked an inane quiz question: ‘What taxation would apply to the profit earned abroad during the vesting period if the options were simply exercised in Israel on the individual’s return to Israel?’, our Clapham Omnibus gent would reasonably have come up with: ‘Zero’. At that point, the trapdoor under his upper deck seat would have opened and sent him crashing into the arms of the conductor collecting fares below.

‘You’ve got to pick a pocket or two’

The decision given, in 2016 and once again in 2018, was that – although Israel operates a standard modified personal tax basis (Israeli residents are taxed on their internationally sourced income, and foreign residents on their Israeli sourced income), as salaried employees are charged to tax in Israel on a cash basis, the entire amount should be charged to tax in Israel, even though it was not sourced in Israel.

A rare oldie but goodie

The 2016 decision, with its literal accuracy but flawed concept (cash basis is a timing concept, not a country source concept), stopped there. Clambering to his feet, the bus inquisitee – still hoping for the holiday for two in Benidorm – would have accepted the challenge of the next question: ‘If the individual once more leaves Israel, and he subsequently exercises options abroad, part of the vesting period of which was while he was Israeli resident, what would be his tax in Israel?’ Easy! Already seeing in his mind’s eye his six-pack lying on the beach next to his bright yellow lilo, he would answer: ‘Zero! He is on a cash basis!’ At which point the floor would open up and – if he managed to avoid the rear axle of the bus – he would be left, not believing his bad luck, in the middle of the road, holiday dreams in tatters. All thanks to the November 2018 decision that – correctly – states that the income sourced in Israel is taxable in Israel with no reference to where it was received. The problem is that it also restates the 2016 ruling’s cash-basis conclusion, making it inconsistent and illogical.

The 2016 ruling brought a sardonic smile to my face. The 2018 ruling is laughable.

I think I’ll try this one on my kids.

Posted in Israel and tagged humor, humour, International Tax, Israel tax | Leave a comment

20 Nov 2018

2 Comments

It’s just not cricket

He might still need more proof of residence than this

Last month’s news from India, that tax residency certificates would no longer be a must for foreigners claiming treaty benefits, will come as a welcome relief to the finance departments of organizations doing business with that great country. Obtaining certificates of residence can be a pain in the neck, especially when they are needed quickly. When it comes to transparent partnerships, like accounting firms, the bureaucracy can be a nightmare.

Although at first sight this announcement may put India in a positive light, it is more a reflection of the relief to heads no longer banging against brick walls – the original requirement for certificates stemmed from a silly amendment to the law in 2012. There is so much that is daft about India’s approach to international taxation.

When I hear the words ‘India’ and ‘Tax’ juxtaposed, I invariably think of Kipling’s quote ‘Power without responsibility – the prerogative of the harlot throughout the ages.’

India – the largest democracy on Mother Earth – has, when it comes to international tax, a split personality. On the one hand, its appellate tribunals and courts wax more lyrical than anybody else on tax issues brought before them. In 2017 it was estimated that nearly a quarter of a million disputes were awaiting resolution. Every international tax practitioner knows that, when examining the case history of OECD treaty articles, it is rare for a bon mot from India not to pop off the page. On the other hand, India maintains primitive imperialist designs on the tax that rightly belongs to others (I wonder what Gandhi would have said). Its Dividend Distribution Tax, declared a tax on the distributing company rather than a withholding tax on the recipient, has deftly (and, I believe, uniquely) sidestepped treaty withholding restrictions, while its technical services tax has long-armed income that should have nothing to do with India. Then there was that beautiful moment a few years back when they followed seller Hutchison and buyer Vodafone up the food chain, and rather than going for a bite out of the indirect seller’s cake, tried improbably to extract it from the indirect buyer’s mouth. That’s chutzpah.

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It could have been worse. It is only an accident of history that they didn’t produce Austin Allegro doppelgangers

Perhaps, however, this recent loosening of the tax belt is not just a blip, but a symptom of something bigger. Since 2014 India has jumped a remarkable 65 places in the World Bank’s Ease of Doing Business rankings. Starting in 142nd place, it is today sandwiched at 77 between Uzbekistan (the butt of many of Borat’s jokes) and Oman. To show they were aware that the century had turned, they even stopped production of the Hindustan Ambassador in 2014 – a copy of an early model of the Morris Oxford that the British replaced nearly sixty years previously. That’s progress.

Microsoft, IBM, Proctor and Gamble, Tesco, Wallmart, motor companies (thank heaven not British) – India is opening up for business. This has been accompanied by a massive reform in indirect taxation.

It is to be hoped that international direct taxation will be next. Wouldn’t it be nice if those legislators who draft the laws so suspectly could listen to those world-class judges charged with interpreting them so expertly? Or is that an encroachment upon the foundations of democracy?

Posted in India and tagged humor, humour, International Tax, tax

12 Nov 2018

The taxman takes his cut

At least he also had a day job

Initially dubbed ‘the war to end all wars’, the act of carnage that ended a hundred years ago this week had to later suffer the ignominy of having ‘First’ stuck at the front of its name. While recognizing the sacrifice of the combatants and the tragedy of 20 million dead, subsequent generations have suggested the futility of the whole thing.

As the world prepared to commemorate those events, Israel’s judges, perhaps ironically, had to waste their valuable time on something else absolutely futile – the taxation of professional poker players (not one, but two). The wording of the judgements (and appeals) gave the distinct impression that each learned judge would have been quite happy for the young men in question to take their chances being ‘sent over the top’, but they had no choice other than to give them a fair hearing.

Although I have no sympathy for gamblers, and in both cases the end result was the payment of tax at marginal rates (one of them had to be reined in by the court as an Israeli tax resident), the result bothered me.

Israel, like other tax jurisdictions, operates a system of marrying income to various sources (such as business or vocation, work, interest). The word ‘income’ is defined in dictionaries as deriving from capital or labour – fitting nicely with the sources mentioned in the Income Tax Ordinance (which is just as well, really, since it is called the ‘Income’ Tax Ordinance). The proceeds from gambling and lotteries do not derive from labour or capital, and did not therefore have a place at the sources table in the law. In the course of time, however, legislators were reminded of HL Mencken’s definition of Puritanism: ‘The haunting fear that someone, somewhere, may be happy.” As a result they shoe-horned an extra clause taxing profits from gambling, lotteries and prizes. To make the whole thing work they called the resultant windfall ‘income’, a sleight of hand that would not disgrace the most unsavoury of card sharks.

However, when the tax authorities brought the two intrepid poker players to the table, they did not play for the 25% tax that the misplaced clause then legislated, but full marginal tax on the basis of ‘business’ income. Both these characters were, after all, professional players. The position of the courts was that – similar to business income – their income could be considered income from a vocation, their expertise implying effort and, therefore, labour. The last hand played was the appeal against the tax authorities’ insistence not to allow expenses in the production of income such as flights, hotels and payments to the casinos that financed some of the tournament games (the mind boggles). Here, the judge was consistent – if it’s income from a vocation, it’s a vocation, and proven expenses should be allowed.

And so did they…

The bug in all this is that while these poker players were taken out of the bunker of restricted tax onto the battlefield of regular income, there is still dissonance.

The various sources of income (labour and capital) that combine to form the backbone of the Income Tax Ordinance are inextricably linked to Gross National Product and Gross Domestic Product. It isn’t by chance that governments measure their tax take accordingly – by taxing income, they are taking their share of the value created in the economy.

Gamblers – professional or otherwise – do not add to the value of the economy. It is a zero-sum game. One person’s gain is another’s loss. When, the legislature incorrectly added a section on gambling to the Income Tax Ordinance instead of legislating an excise tax (as they should have done), they at least had the sense to exclude the possibility of setting off losses from other sources of income while isolating the gambler’s activity.

In transferring professional gamblers to a business/vocation basis, while the rate of tax may be higher, in a perfect world the overall tax take should be zero (or negative due to expense set-off). Of course, in practice, most of these games are taking place abroad against non-Israeli taxpayers which clearly changes the domestic picture – but today the name of the game in international tax is a level playing field.

It feels like somebody wasn’t playing with a full deck.

Posted in Israel and tagged gambling, humor, humour, International Tax, Israel tax, World War 1 | Leave a comment

05 Nov 2018

FANGs ain’t what they used to be

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Repairs courtesy of the Information Superhighway

Facebook, Amazon, Netflix and Google, the tech giants collectively dubbed the FANGs, are hardly going to be digitally quaking in their virtual boots over British Finance Minister Phillip Hammond’s Budget announcement last week that he plans imposing a 2% Digital Services Tax on their UK related turnover. Hammond himself admitted it would only be expected to bring in around £400 million a year, the amount he coincidentally just allocated to filling pot-holes on Britain’s roads.

The UK is not alone in taking the ladle to the primordial soup of the evolving digital economy – Australia, France, Israel, Hungary, India, Italy (and the UK itself with its Diverted Profits Tax) are already at the feast, due to be joined by the EU when it is finally sick of wasting its time trying to eat the UK for Brexit.

Hammond’s hammering of the Goliaths earned kudos across the entire spectrum of British society (even the Tory-hating Guardian gave grudging praise) – but nobody seemed to pick up on the gaping irony of the whole thing – the use of a neolithic method to tackle a state-of-the-art problem.

Egged on by the 2013 G8 Summit in Northern Ireland (to the non-Catholic citizens of which, I unreservedly apologize for using ‘British’ interchangeably with ‘UK’), the OECD and the rest of the world (apart from a possible few smelly islands once – and probably still – frequented by pirates and other undesirables) have been engaged in tackling the unfairness of the international tax system. I, for one, started out sceptical that anything could be achieved. Country-by-country reporting, the MLI modifying tax treaties, and changes in the Permanent Establishment definition are just some of the impressive advances that have been made in the last six years in the BEPS (Base Erosion and Profit Shifting) project, not to mention (sorry) the automatic exchange of information.

California is still part of the United States

But, there are two major gaps – the United States’ lack of enthusiasm when it cottoned on that it was a large part of the problem the others were trying to solve, and the reform of the taxation of the Digital Economy – which happened to be the first of the 15 Actions listed by the OECD.

The international tax system is founded on two principles established a century ago – ‘nexus’ and ‘profit allocation’. The first is supposed to determine where business is done, and the second, how to divide the spoils between the places of business. Fitting the digital economy into this framework is not easy. In trying to establish where value is created, three challenges have been identified: nexus, data and characterization. The first suffers from what is pompously termed ‘ scale without mass’ – you don’t need much physical presence in a country to do business these days; the second raises the question of the interactivity of data exchange – if a social platform is using data gathered from members, where the income arising from its exploitation belongs; and the third recognizes that the world is changing constantly and the classification of income needs constant updating.

In trying – so far unsuccessfully – to reach a consensus, the participating countries have broadly divided into three groups: those that believe the problem is confined to specific business models involving user participation in data (eg Facebook’s), that need to be dealt with individually; those that believe there is no problem (if you think that is strange – consider how long it took countries to realize there was going to be a Second World War); and those that think everything is completely screwed up, and we need a revolution (hopefully only in international taxation, which can be achieved using pens rather than swords). The OECD has kicked the can down the road (a game my generation played before digitalization condemned children to little screens) with the hope of reaching an agreement by 2020. Given the ‘slight’ differences between the participants, it doesn’t sound like we should be holding our breath – but I have had egg on my face before.

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Which wireless age does the new UK tax belong to?

So, in the meantime, nations like the UK have been driven to adopting recessive taxes that would have been more familiar to the 18th century than the 21st. Its approach to the digital economy is to throw income tax out of the window (or should that be Windows?) in favour of a tax on turnover, that looks far more like the excise duty stuck on barrels of rum that smugglers didn’t manage to secrete in coves along the southern coast of England. (In fairness, it is only to be applied to companies with worldwide turnover of over half a billion pounds, and there will be exemptions for loss making companies and those with low margins).

As an English playwright wrote four centuries ago: ‘O for a muse of fire, that would ascend the brightest heaven of invention’. And I doubt he paid any taxes at all.

Posted in Britain, International Tax and tagged BEPS, Digital Taxation, humor, humour, International Taxation, UK Budget | Leave a comment

28 Oct 2018

4 Comments

Playing the residency card

Who were they?

On a recent bus tour of Barcelona, the recorded commentary declared the ‘immortal’ words of exiled Catalonian President Josep Tarradellas on his return in 1977: ‘Citizens of Catalonia, I am here’. This immediately conjured in my mind the immortal line from the BBC’s Goon Show: ‘Everybody’s got to be somewhere.’ Great philosophy it aint, but the concept of ‘being here’ has been a cornerstone of modern international taxation since its salad days a hundred and fifty years ago – ‘where you are’, rather than ‘who you are’.

Despite an intuitive tendency – demonstrated countless times over the years in meetings with prospective clients – to think that international taxation depends on ‘who you are’ (French, German, Spanish, Catalonian), citizenship actually plays a minor role in establishing where direct tax is paid. There are only two countries that tax on the basis of citizenship. One is the African state of Eritrea. The other – slightly larger and louder – is the United States of America. Everyone else looks at ‘residence’ – essentially ‘where you are’. The only time citizenship kicks in is when two competing countries tied by tax treaty are totally stumped.

The confusion is forgivable when you open international taxation journals. Recent news included Montenegro’s joining the ranks of those countries selling citizenship for a mess of pottage. For as little as a 250,000 Euro investment and 100,000 Euro donation to the Government, it will be possible to achieve citizenship within 6 months. Apart from being delightfully situated next to Bosnia and Serbia (complete with NATO membership), it offers the bonus of potential EU membership by 2025 (if the current European order lasts that long), with the advantage of access to the rest of the EU. Apart from Americans (and perhaps wealthy Eritreans) who might court the idea of a second citizenship to enable them to give up the first (thus avoiding draconian tax reporting and, possible, additional tax payment), the principal attraction of these schemes is Visa access for those from even less popular countries (and EU access, where relevant). Tax doesn’t get much of a look-in.

You would also want another passport

Israel is firmly in the ‘residence’ camp and its statute law is well-developed. It is therefore surprising that, in a recent High Court appeal decision concerning a poker player who claimed to be resident nowhere (‘everybody’s got to be somewhere?’), one of the justices declared that a person who is a resident and citizen of Israel, especially one who was born and raised in Israel, even if he goes abroad for a prolonged period, will only shake off residency if he does something clear to break that residency and establish residency elsewhere. Examples cited are renouncing citizenship, and sale of house and assets in Israel. Less convincing would be academic studies or a foreign company posting.

This is diverging a long way from ‘where’, and giving a degree of importance to ‘who’.

As Israel is a member of the OECD and signatory to many double tax treaties based on its model, treaty interpretations will take precedence over domestic law, although there may be an increase in the incidence of mutual agreement procedures. But, it will be interesting to see how matters develop with non treaty countries, as well as the rare situations where an individual claims ‘not everybody has to be somewhere’.

Posted in Israel and tagged humor, humour, Israel, Tax residence

07 Nov 2017

2 Comments

Another bite of Apple?

kennedy-was-also-dealing-with-embassy-bomb-threats-during-the-cuban-missile-crisis

Trump could also do with something to take things off peoples’ minds

In October 1962, at the height of the Cuban Missile Crisis, John F Kennedy quietly signed into law the most extra-territorial tax system in the history of the human race. As the world faced MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction), it perhaps wasn’t the most important thing on the minds of American CEOs that week. Buried in the dark recesses of the US Tax Code, the Subpart F provisions for Controlled Foreign Corporations soon became the blueprint for advanced nations everywhere to enable their Treasuries to reach abroad and dip their hands into the profits of their residents’ foreign holdings.

Fast-forward 55 years, and America is blessed with a populist president who – to put it mildly – doesn’t do things quietly. Yet, last week’s House tax reform proposals spoke of a move to an anti-populist territorial tax system for Corporate America (Google translate: Render unto Caesar what is Roman), and – I, at least – do not recall hearing the Donald’s bellowing protests or observing his trembling orange mop.

Why not?

Possibly, because this is the most goddamed-extra-territorial tax proposal in the history of the human race. It is the mother of extra-territorial tax proposals. The message it sends to multinational Corporate America – especially the high-tech variety – is: ‘You can bring your cash home any time you like, because we are going to find your profits in whatever foreign paradise they are sunning themselves, and we are going to nail them.’

The ingenious weapon they want to add to the ageing, but sprightly, Subpart F provisions is the invasive ‘Foreign High Return’ amount of controlled foreign corporations. In a nutshell, the US Treasury will allow US-owned foreign companies to earn a reasonable return on their tangible property abroad, and tax the remainder at half the US corporate rate (ie 10% in the proposal) whether it is repatriated or not. This actually puts some vague sense into President Trump’s surprising remark to Japanese auto-manufacturers this week that they should bring production to the United States. Of course, as any non-president-of-the-United-States knows, Japanese manufacturers already produce 75% of the vehicles they sell in America on American soil. Now that American car manufacturers will evidently have an incentive to produce ALL the cars they sell abroad in tax-friendly countries beyond the Statue of Liberty, it is perhaps only fair that the good old Japanese help out.

The foreign tax credit allowed in the US will be 80% of the tax paid, meaning that profits taxed at more than 12.5% should not be further taxed at home. Given the latest revelations in the Paradise Papers, this would mean that hi-tech companies not protected by exemptions due to normal returns on tangible property, will be taxed on an ongoing basis – albeit at a competitive rate.

What was that logo?

In the meantime there will be a one-time tax on repatriating existing foreign earnings of 12% (cash etc) and 5% (illiquid assets).

And, if all this is not enough, just for the fun of bayoneting the wounded, a 20% excise tax is proposed on payments out of the United States.

My hunch is that the reason POTUS hasn’t been shooting off about all this is that he hasn’t quite absorbed it yet. That may not matter. Under the American system of government the chances of this, largely interesting, proposal passing are about as high as Donald Trump’s chances were a year ago today of winning the US presidential election.

Something to chew on.

Posted in United States and tagged humor, humour, tax reform, United States taxation

29 Oct 2017

Who wants to live forever?

Not quite the tax doctor I had in mind

There was a time, not long ago, when the ideal higher education of a tax specialist was a combination of law and accounting. With the gradual death by asphyxiation of income tax planning, the ambitious young prospective practitioner might add a third arrow to his bow – doctor of medicine.

Many would argue that, despite frustrating bureaucracy, the gathering pace of intergovernmental cooperation in the war on tax evasion and money laundering is one of the great advances of twenty-first century society. However, the process has also brought to the surface long dormant legalities that most governments would have been happy to leave as long dormant.

Take American Estate Tax. A foreigner who dies holding (not literally) more than $60,000 worth of US securities, invites a bill to his estate in respect of US Estate Tax. That rule has been in place since, I believe, 1913, but has only been inadvertently enforced since FATCA rules forced international banks, on pain of lynching, to handle all withholding tax obligations on behalf of the IRS. The upshot is that savvy investors (especially those past the waterfall three-score-and-ten years) are deserting US securities, or finding obscure ways to invest indirectly.

But the problem does not stop there. In an increasingly negotiable world, where the successful can remain in daily touch with their homebound families and visit regularly, estate and inheritance taxes are often the death knell for staying put. And if that is not enough, some countries impose an insidious wealth tax.

If you wanted an example of a country that has, for years, seemed to encourage their citizens to get on their onion-laden bikes and seek comfort elsewhere, you need look no further than France.

A combination of estate tax and wealth tax (helped along by an aborted 75% top income tax rate) sent packing the likes of actor Gerard Depardieu (Belgium, and thence to Russia with love), and singer Florent Pagny (Portugal, who?). The typically French defense against the mounting exodus (some reports suggest some 10,000 since the turn of the century) was typified by the Defense Minister stating that those who love their country stay in France. Sacre bleu. To an Englishman like me, pro patria mori has never stood out as a French sentiment.

France’s sixth biggest city

Well, it looks like Fortress France, at least, is finally taking baby steps forward under its exceptionally young new president’s tutelage.

A few weeks ago the prime minister proposed a severe curtailing of the wealth tax – restricting it to real estate. But, there is some doubt as to whether that will be enough to encourage wealthy French to return home – especially given that estate tax still remains.

Ultimately, unless the current passion for Balkanization (Spain, UK, Iraq) takes hold – creating a dampening of global mobility – there can be no room for estate taxes or wealth taxes in the future world order. Despite their political attraction as a component in the fair distribution of everything (optical rather than actual), they create a drain on national coffers.

In the meantime, expert tax planners will try to keep their clients alive long enough to move them out of undesirable post-mortem jurisdictions. Is there a tax doctor in the house?

Posted in France, International Tax, United States and tagged Estate Tax, humor, humour, International Tax | Leave a comment

04 Sep 2017

Yes, Minister

Keep it simple…

Looking confused next to the overhead locker of my assigned Business Class seat on a British Airways flight from Heathrow to New York last year, I was approached by a helpful flight attendant (if that is what stewardesses are called these days) who offered assistance. Pointing to the little picture indicating which mini-compartment was 12A, and which 12B, I told her I was unfortunately pictorially dyslexic. She looked momentarily sympathetic before bursting out laughing: ‘What do you mean, pictorially dyslexic? There is no such thing!’

For all I know, she was right.

The fact is that our brains have become so used to hard-edged information being pureed into easily digestible mush, that many of us find it hard coping with anything more taxing than a Facebook intelligence test. (I was recently informed I had an IQ of over 160 because I knew a photograph was of Adolf Hitler, rather than the other choices of Donald Trump and Michael Bloomberg. Surely everyone knows that neither Trump nor Bloomberg has a moustache.)

If you think I am being unfair, take literature. In this day and age, if you want to be published, you have to keep sentences short, and multiple adjectives locked up. So, you would think that chucking the following paragraph – which doubles up as a sentence – at the reader on the first page of a 500 page novel might have condemned the author to obscurity:

‘In consideration of the day and hour of my birth, it was declared by the nurse, and by some sage women in the neighbourhood who had taken a lively interest in me several months before there was any possibility of our becoming personally acquainted, first, that I was destined to be unlucky in life; and secondly, that I was privileged to see ghosts and spirits; both these gifts inevitably attaching, as they believed, to all unlucky infants of either gender, born towards the small hours on a Friday night.’

Thankfully, the book saw the light of day in 1850, not 2017, and David Copperfield became one of Charles Dickens’s most-loved novels.

Until fairly recently, I believed that one area of intellectual pursuit that had escaped the brain surgeon’s knife was taxation. Taxation is complicated, and advisors have kept it complicated. How often have we watched with satisfaction as our clients’ eyes have glazed over, knowing at the end of a tortuous meeting that they will just tell us ‘to deal with it’?

…or not.

Then – Shock! Horror! – in 2010 the British Treasury came up with the Office of Tax Simplification. 450 recommendations later – including such game changers as simplification of the corporation tax computation and out-of-date procedures still requiring paper confirmation for stamp duty transactions (themselves an anachronism) – the OTS published its first annual report. Apart from a ‘first annual report’ issued seven years after inception being a leading candidate for the accolade ‘the triumph of hope over experience’, the wording itself left hope for tax professionals:

‘The OTS is in a unique position to highlight issues, stimulate debate and act as a catalyst for positive change, being strongly connected within government, having exceptionally wide access to a range of deep expertise from outside government and speaking with an independent voice.’

Charles Dickens couldn’t have written a better paragraph (doubling up as a sentence) himself. In fact, it almost looks like the Office of Tax Simplification could come to rival Little Dorrit’s Circumlocution Office.

The spirit of Bleak House’s Jarndyce and Jarndyce lives on. Mercifully.

Posted in Britain, International Tax and tagged British Tax, International Tax, Tax humor, Tax humour | Leave a comment

14 Aug 2017

Some like it hot

Will this save the planet…?

Political fossil Al Gore’s sequel to his Oscar winning environmental documentary ‘An Inconvenient Truth’ – ‘An Inconvenient Sequel’ – may have underwhelmed at the box office this month, but it provided a timely counterweight to President Donald Trump’s announcement some weeks earlier that the United States was pulling out of the Paris Agreement. Despite the protestations to the contrary of substantially every-government-that-is-not-America’s (as well as several of the States that enable the United States to be called the United States), without Federal US involvement all bets for preventing environmental Armageddon appear to be off.

Until recently, the Tax World’s contribution to the fight against this threat to our future generations had taken the form of airing the concepts of ‘Cap and Trade’ and ‘Carbon Taxes’ – the former involving the auction and trade of emission permits that seek to limit total pollution from certain gases, the latter a hit or miss, essentially regressive, tax on fossil fuels and suchlike.

Then, last month, things hotted up.

In his State of the Nation address, President Rodrigo Duterte of the Philippines told mining companies that ‘he would tax them to death’ if they did not clean up their act. Coming from anyone else, the statement might have been filed alongside Benjamin Franklin’s ‘nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes’, but Duterte has, for some time now, been proudly having drug pushers and other undesirables knocked off wholesale in extra-judicial killings. The message is clear – the president clearly reckons himself the biggest threat since Mohammed Ali throttled Joe Frazier in the Thrilla in Manila.

Indeed, Duterte also announced that, you-couldn’t-make-up-its-name, ‘Mighty Corp’ has agreed to pay the government a cool half a billion dollars to settle the mining giant’s alleged catalogue of criminal tax evasion offences. Simple when you have the method sussed.

And, to cap it all, any additional tax take from the mining sector is to be earmarked for local communities damaged by the mines, while processing of mineral resources is ‘requested’ to be performed in the Philippines before export, thus adding to employment. Interesting, if worrying.

…or will this?

With all due respect to Mr Gore’s valiant efforts, if the environment is to get back on track, the mob that elected Trump doesn’t need a staid documentary – it needs exciting Alternative Facts. So, perhaps the real existential question now is whether there is enough material for Quentin Tarantino to make a movie about taxing environmental terrorists. The climactic scene: an Internal Revenue Service agent, in sleek black suit and Ray-Ban shades, standing with his foot pressuring the windpipe of a prostrate business executive, two revolvers cocked and pointed at the entrepreneur’s trembling head, spits, ‘You’re going to clean up the river in this goddamn town, or we’re going to tax you to goddamn death’.

All’s fair in love and war. And, if Mr Tarantino is looking for a working title, how about: ‘Kill Fake Bills’?

Posted in International Tax, Philippines and tagged Climate Change, Environment, Global warming, humor, humour, International Tax, Philippines, tarantino, tax | Leave a comment