Jersey Unreported Judgments

[2008]JRC181

royal court

(Samedi Division)

23^rd October 2008

Before     :

H. W. B. Page, Esq., Commissioner and Jurats Bullen and Morgan.

 

The Appellant appeared on his own behalf.

Crown Advocate C. M. M. Yates for the Respondent.

judgment

COMMISSIONER:

1.        This is an appeal by Mr. Anthony Fulton (who represented himself) under Article 36 of the Income Tax (Jersey) Law 1961 ("the 1961 Law") from a decision of the Commissioners of Appeal, given on 15^th May, 2008, under Article 33(b), upholding the determination by the Respondent ("the Comptroller") of Mr. Fulton's Income Tax liability for the year 2006.

2.        The point at issue, in lay terms, concerns allowances for children in higher education under Article 95 of the 1961 Law.

3.        At the material time, Article 95 provided, so far as relevant to the present appeal as follows:-

"95. Children

(1) If an individual proves -

(a) that the individual has living at any time within the year of assessment any child who is either under the age of 16 years or who if over the age of 16 years at the commencement of that year was receiving full-time instruction at any school, the individual shall, subject to the provisions of this Article, be entitled in respect of each child to a deduction of £3,000; or

(b) that the individual has living at any time within the year of assessment any child who is over the age of 17 years and was receiving full-time higher education the individual shall, subject to the provisions of the Article, be entitled in respect of each child to a deduction of £5,000.

In this paragraph, "child" includes a step-child and an illegitimate child whose parents have married each other after the child's birth.

(2) If an individual proves that for the year of assessment the individual has the custody of and maintains at the individual's own expense any child who is under the age of 16 years at the commencement of that year or who, if over the age of 16 at the commencement of that year, is receiving such full-time instruction or full-time higher education as aforesaid and that neither the individual nor any other individual is entitled to a deduction in respect of the same child under the foregoing provisions of this Part, or, if any other individual is entitled to such a deduction, that that other individual has relinquished the individual's claim thereto, the individual shall be entitled in respect of the child to the same deduction as if the child were a child of the individual.

(3) In the case of a child who is entitled in the child's own right to an income exceeding £2,500 a year, the deduction under this Article in respect of the child shall be reduced, in the case of a deduction referred to in paragraph (1)(a), by the amount of the excess and, in the case of a deduction referred to in paragraph (1)(b), by £3 for every £2 of the excess.

(4) Where, for any year of assessment, 2 or more individuals are entitled to a deduction under this Article in respect of the child, the deduction shall be apportioned between them in such proportion as they agree, or, in default of agreement, in proportion to the amount or value of the provision made by them respectively (otherwise than by way of payments deductible in computing their respective total incomes) for the child's maintenance and education for the year of assessment.

(5) [Recovery of excess deductions under (4)].

(6) In this Article "higher education" has the same meaning as in the Education (Jersey) Law 1999."

 (NB: The applicable sterling figures have since changed, those shown above being the relevant ones at the time in question. The underlined emphasis is ours.)

4.        The Article, therefore, makes provision for three main categories of child, where "child" plainly means offspring (or step-child) of the taxpayer; those under 16 during the year of assessment (paragraph (1)(a)); those over 16 at the beginning of the year of assessment who are still at school (also paragraph (1)(a)); and those over the age of 17 receiving full-time higher education (paragraph (1)(b)).  These three categories are then supplemented by a fourth which is substantially co-extensive with the other three but applies to children of whom the individual "has custody" and whom he/she "maintains at the individual's own expense" notwithstanding that the child in question is not the off-spring of the individual (paragraph (2)).  This fourth makes explicit a condition that is taken for granted in the other three cases:- that the child is maintained at the individual's expense.  But it is the third of these categories (paragraph (1)(b) of Article 95) and the effect of the second part of paragraph (3) with which this appeal is concerned.

5.        So far as paragraph 1(b) of Article 95 is concerned, the material facts are not in dispute.  Mr. Fulton has three daughters, the eldest of whom is Chantelle (if we may be forgiven for referring to her simply by her first name).  At the beginning of 2006 she was in her final year at Sussex University and was 20 years of age.  By the end of July 2006 she had completed the course and graduated, having also attained the age of 21 on 24^th June that year.  It is common ground, therefore, that in being assessed to Income Tax for the year 2006 Mr. Fulton was entitled to a deduction under paragraph 1(b)  - subject only to paragraph (3), if applicable.

6.        As regards paragraph (3) of Article 95, here too the facts are not in issue.  Chantelle had no income of her own in 2006 while she was still at university.  After she had graduated, however, she had earnings as follows for the months August to December 2006 (the figures being taken from the document entitled "AGREED STATEMENT OF FACTS"):-

- August:      The Jersey Opera House Ltd      £   400

- September: Messrs. KPMG                             £1,855

                    The Jersey Opera House Ltd.         £   100

- October:     Messrrs. KPMG                            £1,855

- November: Messrrs. KPMG                             £1,880

- December: Messrrs. KPMG                             £1,855

  Total:                                                            £7,945

                                              

7.        Once again it is common ground that if this income of his daughter is relevant for the purposes of paragraph (3) of Article 95, then, application of the formula laid down in that paragraph has the effect of eliminating any deduction to which Mr. Fulton would otherwise be entitled under paragraph (1)(b): the precise calculation is immaterial for present purposes.

8.        Now, the standard form of Income Tax Return for the 2006 year of assessment included a section headed "ALLOWANCES FOR THE YEAR OF ASSESSMENT,  Section 4.1 of which was headed as follows:-

"CHILDREN - Enter the details of dependent children. If the child is over the age of 16 at the start of the year, or had an income, it is important to complete the last two boxes with care as the amount of the allowance may be affected. "Child" means a natural child, adopted child, stepchild or other child of whom you have the custody and care."

There then followed a table with four columns or "boxes" headed (reading from left to right) "Full name(s)", "Date(s) of birth", "Educational establishment attended", and "Income in own right".

9.        When it came to completing this section of his tax return for 2006 on 7^th May, 2007, while Chantelle's date of birth and educational establishment were on any view correctly recorded, Mr. Fulton entered "Nil" in the "Income in own right" column with an asterisk immediately alongside which referred to a footnote reading "BEFORE LEAVING UNIVERSITY".  The entries for his other daughters showed them both to be in full-time education, with the middle one having an income of £1,777 and the youngest having none.

10.      However, in the subsequent Notice of Assessment issued by the Comptroller to Mr. Fulton on 12^th November, 2007, Article 95 deductions were only given for two children the way in which this was shown was somewhat cryptic, but there is no dispute that this related to Mr. Fulton's other two daughters and that no deduction was allowed for Chantelle.  The reason for this was that by then the Comptroller had ascertained from Chantelle's own tax return for 2006 that she had earnings for that year of £7,945 as set out above.

11.      As we understand it, at a later stage there was a something of a surreal exchange of correspondence between Mr. Fulton and the Comptroller which resulted in Chantelle signing a form giving the Comptroller permission to disclose to her father details of her employers and her earnings, as held in his records, some six months after the assessment was raised.

12.      On 4^th December, 2007 Mr. Fulton gave notice of his wish to appeal against the assessment issued by the Comptroller.  The appeal was heard by the Commissioners of Appeal on 15^th May, 2008 and was rejected.  No reasons were given.  Mr. Fulton then lodged a Notice of Appeal to the Royal Court under Article 36 of the 1961 Law and on 2^nd July, 2008 the Deputy Bailiff gave directions which included, among other things, a direction that the Commissioners to give reasons for their decision within 14 days.  The Commissioners' response took the form of a letter from Advocate Adam Clarke, the Clerk to the Commissioners, to Mr. Fulton dated 14^th July, 2008 in the following terms:-

"I understand that at the recent directions hearing, the Royal Court directed that the Commissioners of Appeal for Income Tax should provide reasons for their decision. This is perhaps a peculiar Direction as the Commissioners are not obliged to provide reasons for any of their decisions. Indeed this is a Direction that may have been deemed nugatory had the redacted minute of the Hearing on 15 May 2008 been available before the Directions hearing (something which could not be achieved due to the absence of one of the Commissioners from the Island).

Be that as it may, I now enclose a copy of the redacted minute together with the annexed papers provided by the Income Tax Department and Mr. Fulton.

I am instructed to add that the Commissioners main considerations in reaching the decision were:

a)  That the provisions of the Article 95 of the Income Tax (Jersey) Law 1961 ("the Law") are tightly drawn and do not provide for discretion nor interpretation.

b)  That the role of the Commissioners is to apply the Law as it is drafted and not to seek to amend or distort the same by interpretation. If the Appellant believes that the provisions of the Law ought to be interpreted in any other way or amended to remove any perceived injustice that is for the Royal Court to opine upon and the legislature to approve.

c)   That in the same way that the Appellant is seeking to claim that his daughter's declared income after graduation should be ignored because she is no longer his child in full time higher education after that date, it would have been inequitable for the Appellant to have received the full benefit for the first year of his daughter's full time higher education which would have commenced in September of that year."

The "minute" to which reference was made (which we were assured had only been redacted to the extent of excluding material relating to the cases of other taxpayers) does not in itself give any reasons for the decision beyond saying that the Commissioners concluded that the provisions of Article 95 had been correctly applied.

13.      It is convenient at this point to deal with two subsidiary submissions by Mr. Fulton reflected in points a) and b) of the considerations mentioned in the letter dated 14^th July, 2008 from the Clerk to the Commissioners.  Mr. Fulton's primary contention is that, properly understood, paragraph (3) of Article 95 does not apply to a post-graduate's income.  But, in the alternative, he argues two things: first, that if a strict reading of the paragraph is against him this Court has, as the Commissioners had, a discretion that it should exercise so as to interpret the provision in a way that would accord with fairness and equity and thus produce the result for which he contends; and, secondly, that if that is wrong then this Court should direct the Comptroller to introduce an extra-statutory concession of the kind for which numerous precedents can be cited which would have the same effect (not just for him, but for all tax-payers).  But both submissions are misconceived.  Paragraph (3) confers no discretion of any kind on the Comptroller, the Commissioners or this Court as to the way in which its provisions should be interpreted or applied.  Nor is it any part of the function of the Commissioners or this Court to devise, and direct the Comptroller to implement extra-statutory concessions.

14.      The only real question at issue here is the true construction, on ordinary principles, of Article 95 and paragraph (3) in particular.  On any view, its wording is curious in that, if the Comptroller is right, the critical threshold of "an income [in the child's own right] exceeding £2,500 a year" requires account to be taken of all and any income of the child in question whatever the source or nature, including for example, earnings from part-time, occasional or holiday jobs.  Yet if that is right, the obvious wording to use would have been "exceeding £2,500 for the year of assessment", whereas the words actually employed, "exceeding £2,500 a year", suggest, in ordinary parlance, an accrued source of income of a permanent or recurrent kind: income under a settlement or inheritance, a contract of employment paying an annual salary, or an annual grant of some kind.  The latter construction, it is true, was summarily dismissed by Atkinson J. in the English case of Williams v. Doulton (HM Inspector of Taxes) [1948] 1 AER 603, but his observations on the argument (as reported at least) are cursory, the main point at issue in that case being whether the child's earnings were income "in his own right".  The awkwardness of the language was expressly recognised by members of the House of Lords in Mapp (Inspector of Taxes) v. Oram [1970] AC 362, HL a decision on section 212 of the British Income Tax Act 1952 where the same phrase was employed; but as the reported argument of counsel for the taxpayer (at 365) and several of the speeches of their Lordships (notably  those of Lord Hodson at 371, Lord Dilhorne at 374, Lord Upjohn at 375 and Lord Pearson at 377) make plain, the appeal proceeded in practice on the assumption that it was the income that the child had actually received in the year in question, irrespective of its nature, that was relevant and that it was unnecessary to decide whether this accorded with the true meaning of the words.  Here too, in the present appeal, this is not a question that we are called upon to resolve as no argument to the contrary was advanced by Mr. Fulton, possibly because it would not have been open to him.  Chantelle's pattern of earnings between August and December 2006 suggest that she may very well have had a training contract with KPMG which would on any view have entitled her to an income "exceeding £2,500 a year" in the ordinary sense of those words.  But the point illustrates the fact that the wording of paragraph (3) is on any view not entirely free of ambiguity.

15.      The essence of Mr. Fulton's main argument is this:-

(i)        that the purpose of the child allowance under both Jersey and UK legislation is - as he put it - "to alleviate the burden on parents in paying for educational expenses", though the better formulation to our mind is that accepted by Ungoed-Thomas J in Mapp at first instance ([1968] 2 WLR 267):-

"The suggestion which is persuasively made here is that the spirit and intention of section 212 is to alleviate the burden of taxation on a parent who has to pay for the maintenance of a child, and to recognise that, if a child has money of its own, the need to lessen the burden is correspondingly diminished";

(ii)       that this being the purpose, any income that the child may have can only be relevant for the purposes of paragraph (3) to the extent that it is co-extensive in time with the period of higher education and available to help defray the expense of maintaining the child;

(iii)      that a graduate who has embarked on an independent post-graduate career in full-time employment can no longer be called a "child", let alone a child dependent on the care and protection of their parent; and

(iv)      that it would be wrong in principle and anomalous for income earned by the child in that capacity, which may well not be available to the parent, to be treated as having any bearing on any tax allowance to which that parent would otherwise be clearly entitled - a fortiori, where the child is over 18 years of age at the material time and being assessed to tax in her/his own right as in the present case.

16.      The argument has, we admit, a superficial attraction, not least because the idea that a "child's" income should be both subject to tax in the hands of the "child" and also, in the same year of assessment, have the effect of reducing or diminishing the parent's child allowance is one that seems less than satisfactory.  There are, however, some important guiding considerations to be borne in mind.

17.      First, the starting point must, as always, be the natural and ordinary wording of the statutory provision in question.  In the case of paragraph (3) that appears to mean that if a child has income of any kind and at any stage in the year of assessment it is to be taken into account (accepting the interpretation of "exceeding £2,500 a year" adopted in Mapp v. Oram).  Mr. Fulton's argument requires the importation in some way or other of words that would limit relevant income to that arising while the child is still in full-time further education.  Moreover, "child" in this context appears to us to mean natural offspring (or stepchild) without any upper limit as regards age and without reference to whether the child is or is not living with the taxpayer parent at the material time: the only criteria are that in the year of assessment the child was "living" (that is, not deceased), was over 17 and was receiving full-time higher education.

18.      Secondly, it is of course true that what appears to be the general purpose of legislation as ascertained from the statute itself can be an important factor in arriving at the true construction of a provision where more than one interpretation is possible.  We were referred by Mr. Fulton, in this connection, to Mapp v. Oram and to the observations of Lord MacMillan in Astor v. Perry [1935] AC 398 at 417 cited there as well as other passages.  And much the same point could be made by reference to innumerable cases in recent years which reflect the increasing tendency of courts to adopt a "purposive" approach to construction.  But we do not find that general purpose in the present case to be sufficient to give any clear indication that would warrant displacing the ordinary meaning of the particular words of paragraph (3).  In Mapp v. Oram at first instance Ungoed-Thomas J. (whose decision was upheld in the House of Lords) observed:-

"As so often, particularly in Tax Statutes, the spirit and intention of the Act in this case is subject to such uncertainty, at any rate in its application to this particular provision, that it may provide a misleading rather than a reliable guide, and in any case affords a less certain guide than the construction of the words without resort to conceptions of spirit and intention" (emphasis added).

And so it is here.

19.      Thirdly, both parties in the present case appeal to what are said to be anomalies or curiosities that would arise on the construction espoused by the other.  And, it is true that considerations of this kind naturally tend to give pause for thought and are often argued by advocates and prayed in aid by courts wrestling with difficult statutes, contracts or other written instruments, as telling indicators that a particular construction cannot have been what the legislators, parties or draftsman intended.  But a note of caution is probably in order as regards the interpretation of legislation of the kind in issue here.  Lord Upjohn certainly thought so in relation to UK tax statutes. Speaking of such matters in Mapp v. Oram (at 376) he said this:-

"My Lords, I have said on many occasions that in taxing statutes, reliance on hardships or anomalies is a very unsound basis of construction.  The complexities of income tax law today are bound to give rise to cases of anomalies and hardships, sometimes even injustices, not always against the subject, sometimes, though less often against the Crown.  Unless there is some real ambiguity in the language used, and I do not think there is here, it is quite unsafe to allow anomaly, hardship and injustice to control the language Parliament has used. Let us stick to the celebrated words of Rowlatt J. in Cape Brandy Syndicate v. Inland Revenue Commissioners [1921] 1 K.B. 64, 71, approved in your Lordships' House [by Viscount Simon in Canadian Eagle Oil Co. Ltd. v. The King [1946] A.C.119, 140], which, as I have so recently quoted them in Customs and Excise v. Top Ten Promotions Ltd. [1969] 1 WLR 1163, 1172, I will not quote again."

What Rowlatt J. said was:-

"....in a taxing act one has to look merely at what is clearly said.  There is no room for any intendment.  There is no equity about a tax. Nothing is to be read in, nothing is to be implied.  One can only look fairly at the language used". 

This, no doubt, is too severe an injunction for modern taste with its emphasis on a purposive approach to matters of construction (the learned editor of Bennion on Statutory Interpretation, 5^th Edition, 2008, describes Rowlatt J.'s remarks as "erroneous" and "now questionable"), but Lord Upjohn's advice about reliance on anomalies, hardship and the like where there is no "real ambiguity" remains salutary.  In any event, we find it hard to say that there is any real ambiguity in the wording of paragraph (3) so far as relevant to the present issue of the kind that there undoubtedly is in the case of the phrase "exceeding £2,500 a year" as discussed earlier.

20.      In fact, whoever is right in the present case, the whole scheme of Article 95 (1)(b) involves a substantial anomaly in the form of a temporal mis-match between the traditional academic year and the tax year, so that a taxpayer with a child engaged in a three-year university course, for example, is able to claim the full allowance in each of the four years spanned by the course, notwithstanding that in the first and fourth years the child will only have been receiving full-time higher education for part of the tax year.  And another oddity (if the approach adopted in Mapp v. Oram is correct) is that  wages earned by a child from a vacation or part-time job intended to help fund his/her university expenses will, within a certain range, have the perverse effect of reducing or eliminating the parent's entitlement to a higher-education allowance.

21.      The truth of the matter, as it appears to us, is that this particular scheme of allowances as enacted in Article 95 is, by design and, no doubt, in the interests of simplicity, intended to be a fairly blunt instrument which takes little account of nuances and subtleties and in particular makes no provision for apportionment of the annual allowance under paragraph (1)(b) where the child is in full-time education for only part of the year of assessment in question.  By the same token, when it comes to paragraph (3), it similarly takes no account of the fact that the child's income may be referable to a part of the year of assessment when the "child" has ceased to be in full-time education and is, for most purposes, an "adult".  Some may think that this inequitable, as Mr. Fulton plainly does: others may think it a not unreasonable concomitant of the way in which paragraph (1)(b) works.  But even if we were to share Mr. Fulton's view, in the absence of some real ambiguity in the wording of paragraph (3) relevant to the present issue or a result so plainly absurd or repugnant as to suggest that the conclusion must be wrong - and neither applies here - there is insufficient to justify interpreting that paragraph other than in the way that Advocate Yates, on behalf of the Comptroller, submits that we should.

22.      A number of ancillary arguments of Mr. Fulton remain to be mentioned.  He contends that the use by the Comptroller of information derived from Chantelle's own tax return for the purpose of Mr. Fulton's tax assessment involves a breach of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005.  As we have noted earlier, Chantelle gave her consent for the Comptroller to disclose details from her return to her father, but that was not until 30^th April, 2008 for the purposes of Mr. Fulton's appeal to the Commissioners; Mr. Fulton's objection goes to the use made of this information at the time of the Comptroller's assessment of Mr. Fulton's tax liability in November 2007.

23.      Mr. Fulton also suggests that use of another taxpayer's details in this way:-

"discriminates against families of graduates who return to the Island to take up post-graduate employment compared to graduates remaining in the UK or working abroad. Income of the latter would not be disclosed or used to eliminate the child allowance. Such adult children might be married and have no inclination to disclose their post-graduate income to their father.  Neither their father, not the Comptroller of Income Tax would have any way of finding out what their post-graduate income was, if any. It would probably not even occur to fathers to seek to find out or report such income in any event" (paragraph 18 of Mr. Fulton's "Outline Representation").

This, he contends, is in breach of Article 14 of the European Convention on Human Rights as given effect in Jersey by the Human Rights (Jersey) Law 2000 which commenced on 10th December 2006. Mr. Yates says that the argument proceeds on a false premise in that the practice is for a child's income to be taken into account for the purposes of higher education child allowances irrespective of where such income arises. (Whether this accords with a proper interpretation of Article 95 paragraph (3) of the 1961 Law may, perhaps, be open to argument in the light of the decision in Mapp v. Oram on the corresponding statutory provision in the UK Income Tax Act 1952 to the effect that a child's  income earned abroad and not remitted to the UK, and not therefore taxable, was not to be taken into account for the purpose of calculating child allowances. But there are differences in the wording in the two sets of legislation and dangers in seeking to draw parallels between the two without detailed and careful analysis.) This, however, would be only a partial answer, as Mr. Fulton's argument also seems to rest on the contention that, in the case of a graduate-child who lives and works outside Jersey, there would be no income tax return for that child to which the Comptroller could cross-refer to discover or check what income the child had received in the year in question. 

24.      But neither of the preceding points is one that has any direct bearing on the issue on this appeal, which is the determination of Mr. Fulton's liability to tax for the year 2006.  Details of Chantelle's income was information that the Comptroller would have been entitled to look to Mr. Fulton to provide.  There may be cases in which a taxpayer would have genuine difficulty in obtaining the requisite information from the child, but there was no suggestion that that would have been the case here had the Comptroller asked Mr. Fulton for it.  In any event there is no suggestion that the figures used by the Comptroller were anything other than correct.  Whether Mr. Fulton's arguments are right or wrong can, therefore, have no bearing on the outcome of this appeal and it is unnecessary, accordingly, for us to rule on either of the foregoing points.  If the Comptroller's practice in this respect is to be challenged then that should be done in proceedings specific to that purpose in which the issues can be fully explored.  So far as the first point is concerned, if any breach of the Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005 was involved, that it would, in any event, be a point for Chantelle to take rather than Mr. Fulton.

25.      That said, assuming for present purposes that it was legitimate for the Comptroller to make use of information in Chantelle's tax return for the purpose of assessing Mr. Fulton's liability to tax, it seems to us undesirable that recourse should be had to that source of information before first asking Mr. Fulton to supply the information himself.  The asterisked note on his tax return plainly suggested that Chantelle had some post-graduation income and the natural and straightforward thing to do would have been for the Comptroller to write to him and ask for details.

26.      Finally Mr. Fulton complains that at the hearing before the Commissioners, they had been supplied by the Comptroller with a document that had not been given to him and only came to his attention after the Commissioners had given their decision.  The three-and-a-half page document in question, entitled "Addressing Mr. Fulton's grounds of appeal", was, as its title suggests, a summary of the Comptroller's response to Mr. Fulton's case on appeal.  In the Outline Contentions filed on behalf of the Comptroller on this appeal it was said that there was "no evidence" that the Deputy Comptroller, Mr. David Le Cuirot, provided this document to the Commissioners in advance of the hearing before them and that it "was certainly made available at the said hearing and that the Deputy Comptroller went through the said document as part of his oral submissions to the Commissioners" - implying that by that stage, at least, Mr. Fulton was in possession of a copy.  This contention was said to be supported by a passage in the Clerk to the Commissioners' letter of 14^th July 2008.  But that is to read more into the paragraph in question than it actually says, which was "Be that as it may, I now enclose a copy of the redacted minute together with the annexed papers provided by the Income Tax Department and Mr. Fulton."  Pressed on the matter during the hearing before us, Mr. Yates was unable to throw any more light on it.  In the absence of any affidavit from the Deputy Comptroller - which there plainly should have been, it seems to us likely that Mr. Fulton's complaint is well founded.  As it is, we are entirely satisfied that this omission, though unfortunate, has not resulted in any real prejudice to Mr. Fulton given the nature of the point in issue and the fact that he has had an opportunity to present his full case de novo before this Court.  We accept that the 1961 Law confers a generous discretion on the Commissioners as to the manner in which an appeal is conducted and that they are expressly enjoined to "avoid formality in procedure" (Article 29 paragraph (6)(b)); but it is important, nonetheless, to be punctilious about the basic principles of a fair hearing, and that means, among other things, ensuring that any material supplied to the Commissioners is simultaneously made available to the taxpayer.

27.      For these reasons the appeal fails.

28.      Before leaving the matter, there are two other observations in relation to the letter of 14^th July, 2008 from the Clerk to the Commissioners that we wish to make in the hope that they may be of useful guidance on any future appeal.  The first concerns the suggestion in that letter that there was something "peculiar" about the Deputy Bailiff's direction requiring the Commissioners to give reasons for their decision of 15^th May, 2008 "as the Commissioners are not obliged to give reasons for any of their decisions".  This, with respect, betrays an out-moded view of things.  Whatever the practice may have been in the past, in this day and age it is unacceptable that a public body such as the Commissioners should decline to give reasons for their decision when reasonably requested to do so, though this is not to say that they need to be long or that they need to be elaborate.  The second point is that whatever form the statement of reasons may otherwise take, it should be one that bears the signature of the chairman of the Commissioners hearing the appeal, not just that of the Clerk to the Commissioners.   

Authorities

Income Tax (Jersey) Law 1961.

Williams v. Doulton (HM Inspector of Taxes) [1948] 1 AER 603.

Mapp (Inspector of Taxes) v. Oram [1970] AC 362.

Astor v. Perry [1935] AC 398.

Bennion on Statutory Interpretation, 5^th Edition, 2008.

European Convention on Human Rights.

Human Rights (Jersey) Law 2000.

Data Protection (Jersey) Law 2005.