http://www.smh.com.au/news/9906/22/national/national7.html Tuesday, June 22, 1999 If you don't want to pay GST, just ask the Treasurer In the gallery with MIKE SECCOMBE Okay folks, let's do a little tax dodging. No need to fear any legal consequences; the method we are about to explain has the imprimatur of the Treasurer, Peter Costello. Getting around the GST on things like books, CDs, clothing and other consumer goods is easy if you just follow these steps. First you place an order on-line with one of the overseas companies which provides the goods, then you sit back and wait for delivery. The only trick is to make lots of little orders, rather a few big ones. You can get away with it because, as Costello notes in his tax-minimisation advice, sent by letter to a constituent: "Currently the Australian Customs Service (ACS) screens postal articles and cargo, and given the high volume, this is a very resource-intensive exercise. "The relevant By-Law concerns goods of 'negligible or low value'. The By-Law provides that goods received by post can be cleared without duty/WST if the goods are valued at less than $1,000 and the duty and WST combined is less than $50," says Costello's letter, which also stipulates the $250 limit on goods arriving by air or sea cargo. "The ACS intends to maintain this treatment under a GST." To summarise: simply buy goods via the Internet from overseas suppliers, in lots each worth less than $250 or $1,000, depending on the method of delivery. When Labor's Simon Crean produced a copy of the letter in Question Time yesterday, Costello could see nothing wrong with an architect of "A New Tax System" (ANTS) giving advice on how to avoid tax liabilities under it. The Treasurer's argument was that the bylaws referred to were put in place as part of the existing wholesale sales tax (WST) system. This is a partial defence, at best. For a start it highlights a problem - e-commerce - which did not even exist when the WST bylaws came into being, which will only snowball in the future. As Costello's letter tacitly admits, Customs cannot even keep up with the modest traffic in Internet-ordered goods now. How will it ever cope with the huge volumes of the future? And the flow of goods is relatively easy to detect, compared with services. Secondly, the anomaly will become much more significant for certain industries once the GST replaces the WST. Costello's letter itself mentions clothes, books and magazines, which now are not subject to WST but will attract GST. Australia's clothing industry already is in sharp decline; publishers live in dread, since Meg Lees betrayed them and her promise to exempt books from the new tax. But who cares? Go ahead, cook your books orders, avoid getting ANTS on your pants. Dodge tax, the Costello way. -- Leftlink - Australia's Broad Left Mailing List mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.alexia.net.au/~www/mhutton/index.html Sponsored by Melbourne's New International Bookshop Subscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=subscribe%20leftlink Unsubscribe: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]?Body=unsubscribe%20leftlink
