Wednesday 23 July 2008

Paragraph 3(3), Schedule 7AC, TCGA 1992

My favourite sentence in the whole of our tax legislation:

(3) Sub-paragraph (1) does not apply if-
(a) the condition in sub-paragraph ... is met but would not be met but for a failure to meet the requirement in paragraph ...


Sure, the tax profession thinks they know what it means, by guesswork as much as anything, but seriously, can anybody decipher the bit in bold? Is this a double or a treble negative?

1 comments:

Andy Cooke said...

Jeez, that's terrible English. Parsing carefully and reading it through backwards (kind of like the way to solve a maze by navigating in reverse from the destination):

If paragraph [whatever] is not met and this circumstance is explicitly the only reason for sub-para [whatchamacallit] to be met, then sub-para (1) does not apply.

The original author should be taken out and not not not not shot.