Appearing on Johnny Carson's Tonight show in 1975, the ex-governor of California quipped: 'We live in the only country in the world where it takes more brains to figure out your income tax than it does to earn the income.' A little over a decade later, the same gentleman put his pen where his mouth…
Watch this space
The proud boast of the John Lewis Partnership Department Store chain, 'Never knowingly undersold since 1925', is less than impressive when compared with Switzerland's record on international tax. It has never been knowlingly undersold since at least 1872 when one of its cantons signed the world's first every double taxation treaty. I thought of Switzerland when…
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…
The Celtic Tiger changes its stripes
The biggest debunker of conspiracy theories has to be what the British call 'the thirty year rule' for the declassification of secret documents. It is not that the released documents reveal the truth (the really juicy ones are locked up for far longer); it is, rather, the realization that the behind-the-scenes machinations of government way…
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…
Double Dutch
Back in the days when there were twelve pence to a shilling and twenty shillings to a pound, there was an urban myth of a retired Maths teacher who runs into his worst student as the latter climbs out of a Rolls Royce. The younger man embraces his old nemesis, proceeds to thank him for…
Comfort and joy (for some)
Several years ago I wrote a newspaper article about a fresh addition to the Israeli Income Tax Ordinance that included four subparagraphs. Or, at least, there should have been four subparagraphs. The fact that there were only three made the whole thing toothless. My tongue-in-cheek piece suggested a scenario where the Knesset Finance Committee was…
Tales from the Crypto
Kurt Vonnegut famously said: 'True terror is to wake up one morning and discover that your high school class is running the country'. The G20 summit in Buenos Aires earlier this month spawned a myriad online articles about the international taxation of cryptocurrencies (Bitcoin etc). Intrigued by the efforts of my 'classmates' (most of them…
Wakey-wakey!
It is the morning of the Maths exam that will decide which, if any, university awaits the candidate. He/she suddenly realizes that he/she hasn't even started learning the syllabus. How many of us have periodically woken in a cold sweat from that nightmare in the course of our adult lives? I sometimes feel that, especially…
Tax Break 