Eish!

As a tax-payer I’m one of the few and the proud.

Which in turn, appears to make me fewer and consequently more proud. With all this pride going round, it is surprising that I have not, as of yet, sprouted a golden mane and growl a lot. Yes friends, like a rubber hose the tax season is brought down upon us and as I grind my head through the SARS schedule mincer, I cannot help thinking that if only I knew how to file my tax properly I’d probably not get audited every year. [1]

Tax money is a useful thing for an aspiring government. Least of all, it pays for a better quality of finger-foods but occasionally a road gets built, a child gets schooled and a man who hits his thumb with a hammer can get a plaster and a little white pill. These are the things governments provide. Wonderful isn’t it?

Yet I can’t help thinking that I’m being taxed twice over.

The capitalist system is masterful, unsubtle and begins with a “C”. Companies take money from us in return for services or products. It’s a great system and one of the chief reasons why I like to keep money. However, when those companies start giving that well earned money away in public benefit programmes, I can’t help thinking that if all this surplus cash laying around that the shareholders aren’t interested in is such a burden, then why not pass it back to the consumers rather?

As a share-holder, I can’t say I’d be too happy with an investment that thinks it can play in the public, civil or social sector. For the same reason that you don’t want me to sort out your loose tooth [2], I don’t want a room full of pink-shirted bankers thinking they know anything about art. As a consumer too, I’d rather have my call-rates dropped, lowering the bar to all-inclusive communications, than to have to cough up pots of money so that my provider can go on a mass-marketing campaign in the guise of sporting development.

The individual investor and consumer would then be free to contribute whatever and however to whoever they choose. Civil societies would be able to do what they do best. Public benefit programmes would be able to progress unsullied by corporate manhandling and demands [3].

Yet you and I don’t give back to the communities and development programmes that require our support. At least, we don’t give back enough, and so the private sector has seen the opportunity to step in and hold the moral torch for our seemingly uncaring society, becoming a social investment proxy on our behalf, at our cost and without our consent. When seen like this, it is not a policy I would support as an investor. If people adopted this as a moral code, I doubt they would keep many friends.

I don’t have a problem with corporate sponsored empowerment per se. The world needs new little consumers. What I do have a problem with is the duplicity of the situation. The duplicity brings me back to tax which is roughly where my rant start before I took it out for a walk.

A registered public benefit organisation has certain tax implications and it is increasingly easier, thanks to SARS, to become defined as a PBO, even in part. Yet the revenue service is quite clear on what it regards as a donorship and a sponsorship. The former, is anonymous, genuine and carries no perceive marketing or advertising benefit for the donor. The latter does not and the sponsor is free to emblazon their banner above their man-sized cardboard cheques.

Sponsorship clearly needs to be taxed and is [4]. This tax money, in turn, goes back towards its original intention: services, development, empowerment and social investment. Yet the middle-man still gets cheap advertising and gets to flaunt a moral code that they may, or may not, believe in [5].

So it turns out to be true. I do get taxed twice. Duplicitously.

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[1] It’s all rather, uhuh uhuh, taxing.

[2] Although I am able.

[3] There are no free lunches. There is no spoon.

[4] I worked at a grant organisation and it was surprising how few sponsors were aware of their obligations.

[5] Why a car manfucaturer would suggest to us that are, in fact, eco-friendly is beyond me. How, is even more perplexing.