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Tax noncompliance

range of legal and illegal activities that reduce tax paid

Tax noncompliance entails narrowly differentiated concepts arising from systems with expansive tax regulations. Tax avoidance is the legal utilization of the tax regime to one's own advantage, in order to reduce the amount of tax that is payable by means that are within the law; By contrast tax evasion is the general term for efforts to not pay taxes by illegal means.

Quotes

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  • “In many parts of the plains thorny jungles grow, behind the good defence of which the people… become stubbornly rebellious… and pay no taxes.”
    • Babur: Baburnama
  • I’m against these aggressive tax avoidance schemes but I’m not just against them, this Government has taken a huge amount of steps to legislate and toughen the laws and go after aggressive tax avoidance schemes for the very simple reason that if people go after these schemes and aggressively avoid tax they’re making it the case that everyone else has to pay higher taxes as a result so I think we should be very clear, tax evasion is illegal and for that you can be prosecuted, you can go to prison for tax evasion. Tax avoidance is in these cases, very aggressive tax avoidance schemes, they are wrong and we should really persuade not to do them and that’s why we have these court cases where the court looks at whether a scheme is really about avoiding tax rather than anything else and the court was very clear in this case.
  • We don't pay taxes. Only the little people pay taxes.
    • Leona Helmsley, American property tycoon, New York Times (July 12, 1989); Newsweek (July 24, 1989), p. 11. Helmsley later served 19 months in prison for tax evasion.
  • "The more laws are enacted and taxes assessed, the greater the number of lawbreakers and tax evaders."
  • No man in this country is under the smallest obligation, moral or other, so to arrange his legal relations to his business or to his property as to enable the Inland Revenue to put the largest possible shovel into his stores.
  • The difference between tax avoidance and tax evasion is the thickness of a prison wall.
  • Every man is entitled if he can to order his affairs so as that the tax attaching under the appropriate Acts is less than it otherwise would be. If he succeeds in ordering them so as to secure this result, then, however unappreciative the Commissioners of Inland Revenue or his fellow taxpayers may be of his ingenuity, he cannot be compelled to pay an increased tax.
    • Thomas Tomlin, Baron Tomlin, in the UK House of Lords case, IRC v. Duke of Westminster (1936) 19 TC 490, [1936] AC 1. In the UK in the 1930s, this quote was put on the back of business cards of those marketing tax avoidance schemes, to the consternation of the Inland Revenue; see Philip Baker QC [1].
  • Any one may so arrange his affairs that his taxes shall be as low as possible; he is not bound to choose that pattern which will best pay the Treasury; there is not even a patriotic duty to increase one's taxes.
    • Judge Learned Hand, Helvering v. Gregory, 69 F.2d 809, 810-11 (2d Cir. 1934).
  • In common with my predecessors I regard tax avoidance schemes of the kind invented and implemented in the present case as no better than attempts to cheat the Revenue.
    • Lord Templeman, IRC v. Fitzwilliam (1993) 67 TC at 756 (UK).

See also

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