Sir, Your revelation (February 6th) that the advisers on your income tax self assessment, no less, have paid a £1 million settlement, made piquant reading to this Northern reader. Thank heaven for being British, even if only in tax terms!
The British tax code is scrupulously fair and equitable in regrettable cases of taxpayer memory lapse, such as would seem to be at the root here. It has never, in my knowledge, had resort to such primitive devices as tax amnesties, to which your Irish code has had recourse twice (and twice too often, in my view).
Please excuse the bluntness, but cases such as this reinforce my perception, and that of my peers, that your tax code in practice reeks of the Third World. On the one hand, ordinary taxpayers are fiscally gelded and persecuted by an over zealous bureaucracy; on the other, documented heinous fraud has been treated with scandalous lightness.
May I suggest to your politicians that it is a beam (if not a forest) to be taken out of their collective eye, before they might reasonably have the temerity to dabble in the affairs of Northern Ireland? - Yours, etc.,
Chartered accountant, Garden Street, Magherafelt,
Co. Derry.