A few years after the Good Friday Agreement, I found myself driving along the Irish border. Now, as a non-reconstructed Englishman would expect to find in Ireland, the road snaked drunkenly in and out of each of the United Kingdom and Republic of Eire (fortunately no other countries were involved, probably because there was…
When tax legislation bombs
In his bestelling book, ‘Churchill’s Ministry of Ungentlemanly Warfare’, Giles Milton tells the story of the destruction of Peugeot’s factory in Occupied France. The facility had been commandeered for German military production. One night, Bomber Command ordered the dropping of a massive amount of ordnance on the plant, only to discover the following day…
Hoisted with their own petard
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…
English as a very foreign language
Several years ago, I returned from a quick trip to Paris on El Al Business Class. As everybody knows, El Al’s security measures are peerless, but just before the gate at Orly airport, the French insisted on putting us all through a second metal detector. I buzzed. Now, I am a big believer that there…
Votes for taxpayers!
I was sorry to hear that former US president and Nobel Peace laureate Jimmy Carterhad broken his hip last month. I was not sorry to hear that the incident had ruined his planned turkey hunt in his home state of Georgia. I - like the lion's share of the western world - have a visceral…
Tales from the Crypt…
In a landmark Israeli court case last week, it was decided that Bitcoins are assets, the profit on sale of which attracts capital gains tax. The case revolved largely, but not exclusively, around the question of whether such cryptocurrencies meet the description of – well - currencies, exchange differences arising from which are exempt from…
Hand it over and nobody will get hurt
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…
‘Your money or your life, please!’
Stopped in the street by a young person with a clipboard, and asked: 'What do you think motivates people to pay tax?', I would have to answer honestly: 'Five to ten, with time off for good behaviour'. Were my inquisitor brandishing a microphone and staring into a camera, however, the same question might elicit all…
What a laugh!
The irony of Ukraine's recent election of a Jewish president would not have been lost on my grandparents who fled the Odessa pogrom of 1905, but they would have been utterly bamboozled - along with millions of members of their grandson's generation - by the news that he is a satirical comedian. On the other…
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,…
Tax Break 