A newly announced gambling tax could heavily damage South Africa’s horse racing industry and lead to job cuts across the country’s entire gambling sector. Over the weekend prominent figures from the South African gambling industry have stood up in protest against a newly announced tax on gambling winnings. The tax was announced on February 23rd by the Finance Minister of South Africa Pravin Gordhan in the latest government budge. The Minister revealed that winnings on gambling activity would now be subject to a ... Read More

US states, which rely heavily on tax revenues from out-of-state residents, have been shown to be able to impose a significantly lower tax burden on local residents. On February 23rd the Tax Foundation released a new report regarding the tax burdens faced by taxpayers across different US states, with an investigation into the proportion of a state’s tax revenues that are collected from out-of-state residents. The newly published report examined the cumulative effects of state- and local-level taxes on US taxpayers throughout the 2009 ... Read More

A UK based gang has received cumulative sentences of 24 years jail time for a GBP 49 million money laundering scheme revolving around five pound notes, secret codes and text messages. On February 23rd the HM Revenue and Customs (HMRC) released an online statement, revealing that several members of a UK based gang have been sentenced to jail time for their part in the laundering of GBP 48.6 million for criminal gangs in the UK, including the UK's most prominent marijuana smuggler, between ... Read More

The UK HM Revenue and Customs is set to launch a new program which will bombard known tax evaders with extra filing requirements and unannounced financial record inspections, in the hopes of reducing tax non-compliance. On February 22nd the HM Revenue and Customs announced the launch of the Managing Deliberate Defaulters (MDD) program, which will see known tax evaders placed under greater scrutiny of tax authorities for a period of five years. According to the HMRC, the program will apply to individual taxpayers and ... Read More

France is once again urging governments across the world to instate an extensive financial transactions tax, saying that it would be an ideal tool for raising funds towards environmental and development projects, while reducing the occurrence of excessively risky speculative activities by financial institutions. At the recent weekend’s meeting of Finance Ministers and Central Bank Governors from G20 nations in Paris, France came forward to once again spearhead a drive for an international financial transactions tax (FTT). France’s determination to instate the tax ... Read More

US state tax authorities are targeting cell phone owners as an easy way to raise large sums of tax revenues, leading to the relative overtaxation of mobile phone use, with many taxpayers seeing more than a fifth of their bills comprised of taxes. On February 18th the Tax Foundation released States Target Cell Phones for Stealth, Burdensome Taxes, a report examining the difference in tax burdens faced by mobile phone users across all US states. The report revealed that average US cell phone ... Read More

The European Commission has raised concerns with two elements of UK legislation regarding tax treatments of investments in EU-member states, deciding that the rules are against EU Single Market principles. On February 16th the European Commission (EC) formally requested that the UK address two items of tax legislation, as they are considered to be discriminatory and against the principles of the EU Single Market. According to the EC, the UK’s rules regarding the transfer of assets abroad and the attribution of gains to ... Read More