| 17/5/2012 |
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| Board of Special Commissioners - Cases |
| Case No. 32/67 |
Decided: 9 October, 1968 |
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When interpreting tax laws, certain principles are to be applied; tax laws are to be strictly interpreted; words are to be given their ordinary meaning
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Newport's "Income Tax, Law and Practice" states that "... the decisions of the Courts only interpret the statutory provisions which must, moreover, be interpreted strictly to the letter even where the result may be quite out of keeping with the apparent intention of those who drafted and enacted the provisions in question. It is a settled principle that where a Taxing Act has wording which can strictly be construed only in one way, the Court cannot go behind the Taxing Acts themselves in an endeavour to ascertain whether Parliament intended the wording in question to have the effect in law which the Court has found that it in fact has."
So also Konstam, in "The Law of Income Tax", wrote that "It is often said that a taxing Act must be construed strictly in favour of the subject; it may perhaps be more correct to say that a taxing Act must be construed against either the Crown or the person sought to be charged, with perfect strictness, so far as the language of the Act enables the Judges to discover the intention of the Legislature. No tax can be imposed on the subject without words in an Act of Parliament clearly showing an intention to lay a burden upon him. The only safe rule is to look at the words of the enactment and see what is the intention expressed by those words."
Even in considering the merits of the case, the Board is not interested in what could have been done, but in what actually did happen. If the law wanted to make some distinction (say between capital and income, which is being made by appellant in this case) this would have been mentioned. It is a known principle of interpretation of law that lex ubi voluit, dixit.
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