The Journey to Fiscal Enlightenment

Abstract

The title comes from a judgment I gave earlier this year.1 I was talking about the format of the statutes, which emerged from the Tax Law Rewrite project. A key feature of the inclusion of statutory ‘signposts’ which as I put it are there ‘to give clear pointers to each stage of the taxpayer’s journey to fiscal enlightenment’. I will come back to the Rewrite Project later in this speech. But it occurred to me that the phrase might have some relevance to my own career in the tax world, from Revenue Junior in the early 1980s to more recent experience as a judge at different levels of the hierarchy. Forgive me if in this lecture, rather than a structured discussion, I indulge in something of a journey down memory-lane, on my own rather halting progress to something like fiscal semi-enlightenment. I came to tax law relatively late. I did not study it at University or for my bar exams. My early practice was in very different fields, mainly planning, housing, and property law. It was something of a surprise therefore when, in 1979, I was invited to put my name forward for appointment as Revenue Junior on the Common Law side. In those days the Revenue Junior represented the Revenue in most of the cases relating to income and capital gains tax in the Chancery Division, usually on appeal from the General or Special Commissioners. Given the high marginal rates of income tax at the time, there was a steady flow of cases. There used to be a Revenue List, under which a judge was allocated to hear nothing but tax cases for up to four weeks. During that period, the Revenue Junior was fully occupied, but at other times it was possible to maintain my practice in other areas of the law.