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…
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…
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…
Dead Wrong
It's bad enough that, thanks to the controversy surrounding Brexit, the average Briton no longer lives with peace of mind. From April 1 they will no longer die with peace of mind. A headline-grabbing exaggeration perhaps, but probate fees for opening a file to deal with a deceased person's estate are due to jump from…
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:…
Prospecting for tax
If you hear the term: 'sans frontieres', it is odds on that - after 'French' - the first thing that will come into your mind is 'Medicins Sans Frontieres', that truly remarkable international humanitarian medical NGO founded in 1971 and based in Switzerland. Add to that 'Avocats Sans Frontieres', the human rights lawyers, and a…
Nexus, shmexus
In my halcyon days as a tax adviser, a client conference meant lots of numbers thrown at a stark white screen via an overhead projector, the small audience looking pale and bored under the harsh fluorescent lighting. We, the professionals, were geeks that nobody wanted to talk to unless we were saving their cash, or…
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…
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…
Tax Break 