Prison

[Des Taff Jenkins]

Hi All.
Two observations on this thread, one it started out as a debate on prisons and how they should treat criminals, be it little old women who can't pay their TV licence or villains who should be inside, like politicians who no longer have the respect of anyone, then it went into the pros and cons of rich people paying tax.
For mine what is happening in Indonesia is typical. Two Australians?? one Chines one Indian are about to be executed and in my eyes rightly so, they were caught with 8 kilos of the drug ice, a capital offence there, but which would have got them about six months in jail here if they had managed not to get caught
in Indonesia, but if they had got away with it would possibly have killed a few young people, and I doubt they would have payed any tax on the profits so it's all relevant really it's a world now where if you can get away with it do it.
Cheers Des

[Rodney Mills]

Good post John in W.A..

I have done my own taxes since my second year in the U.S.. I too used a tax accountant. He handed back my completed tax return and I found out I owed $1,800.00 additional tax, with a note, "Please enclose a check for the amount owed along with your tax return."...there was a big problem, I didn't have $1,800.00.

I happened to go into a convenience store to by a beer to drown my sorrows and there was a book "How to Lower Your Taxes". I bought it, I studied it word for word. Bottom line, I recalculated and rewrote my tax return, using the one made out by the accountant as a guide to what goes where, and had $250.00 coming back. From then on in I did my own.

I bought more comprehensive books and finally took two college courses Taxation 101 and 102.

Cheers, Rodney

[j.sabourn]

Rodney, thinking back the only way I could of received a tax back return was that the bloke doing it for me must have gone back to when I had been paying taxes. I believe one could in those days go back at least 5 years, may of even been longer. I always kept within the law at the time, whatever it was, think you were allowed so many days in the country during the financial year. When Harold Wilson put a fixed amount which was very low of pounds sterling being taken out of the UK, I always wondered about that, as was the year of the Expo in Montreal, and as I was working for a Montreal company was quite often there. The amount of British people there was in the thousands so they must have had some way of taken money out. It was a ridiculous low figure one was allowed it was impossible for that law to have been maintained. This was in 1967. How they did it when the likes of myself or anyone else was apparently taboo, failed to see. JS

[happy daze john in oz]

Many here in Oz use a tax accountant each year to do the tax return for them, the cost is tax deductible. I never used one and each year got a tax refund, there are so many things you can claim for that a tax accountant will say no to.
Example, my staff got a laundry allowance via the union agreement they were on. But it was only enough for three washes per week. They had to, under the health ac, put a clean uniform on at the start of each shift. When one of the staff tried to get a deduction for the extra she was old no by her accountant. Uniform must have a logo before you can claim he told her. I sent him a copy oft he health act which he said he knew nothing of. No staff member had ay trouble after that.