CUP & OUP 1940-1950: THE WHEEDLERS' WAR (original) (raw)
CUP'S AND OUP'S CLAIMS FOR TAX-EXEMPTION, 1940-1950
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explanation by Andrew Malcolm
With the Charity Commission's 'Public Benefit' consultations currently underway, the present tax-exempt status of the university presses, especially those of Oxford and Cambridge, looks set to be re-examined in 2008 (see The Bookseller 16/3/07 and The Guardian 17/4/07). As a contribution to this debate, in April 2007 Akme obtained and posted on the Internet the hitherto unpublished - and at times hilarious - papers supporting CUP's and OUP's surprisingly recent (1970s) tax-exemption, a privilege which has since allowed OUP in particular systematically to buy out many of its tax-liable competitors and become the UK's largest independent publisher.
The 1970s papers refer to several earlier unsuccessful attempts by the two presses to secure tax-exemption, but when asked, under the Freedom of Information Act 2000, to produce the documents relating to these earlier failed claims, both universities have stated, incredibly, that they are unable to trace them. Akme, however, has tracked them down in the National Archives at Kew, processed them into html, and posted them on the Akme website, for all charity-law scholars now to digest and evaluate.
In 1940 it was suggested that the strikingly unpatriotic timing of CUP's claim for tax-exemption was deliberately chosen to keep, as it successfully did, reports of it out of the wartime newspapers. This, and far worse, turns out to be the case.
Cambridge's covert claim received a flat rejection from the Inland Revenue in June 1940 and, on appeal that November, an even flatter rejection from the Special Commissioners, who simply cited the seemingly incontestable grounds that CUP's trading in the open market in competition with other tax-liable publishers took its activities outside the strictly-defined charitable purposes of the university proper.
Undeterred, within a year CUP tried a scaled-down claim, this time actually invoking the recently-passed War Damage Act to wheedle a tax concession over the capital assessment of the university-owned buildings from which it operated. Although this more detailed application was partially successful, the War Damage Commissioners again stressed that there was absolutely no question of CUP's trading profits going untaxed.
In 1944 Oxford University, in the person, no less, of its Vice-Chancellor Sir David Ross, took up the wheedlers' baton, requesting OUP's exemption from the wartime Excess Profits Tax, an Income Tax surcharge which all corporations (including publishers) were being obliged to pay to supplement the war effort. This time the argument went, somewhat opaquely, that the war work OUP was being given by the Government (for which it was fully paid), somehow prevented the Press from indulging in its normal (loss-making) scholarly publishing, and should therefore be offset by its exemption from E.P.T.
The claim sparked off yet another lengthy, rigorous analysis within the Inland Revenue service of the two university presses' tax history and charitable credentials, at the end of which Sir Alan Barlow, the Chairman of the Inland Revenue Board, unsurprisingly refused the Vice-Chancellor's argument, accusing the university of undue pessimism, exaggeration, and, in scarcely veiled language, unpatriotic behaviour. Again the university presses' liability for taxation on its trading profits was firmly reiterated, and again OUP's wheedle won only a minor concession on the estimation of its capital assets, in particular a revaluation of its ancient Bible-printing privilege.
Six years later, with a new Board Chairman at the I.R. helm, OUP tried yet again to claim exemption from Income Tax ("I was tackled in Oxford last weekend...") and yet again, after yet more lengthy analysis, the Revenue remained adamant that the University's book trading was not within its charitable purposes and must therefore be taxed like that of other publishers.
Establishment conspiracy theorists may find themselves being pleasantly surprised by the implacable logic and thoroughness applied by all the Inland Revenue officials involved throughout these four UP wheedles and might well ask why this admirable rigour subsequently disappeared in the 1970s, when the two presses finally and secretly got their tax-exempt way. The clue is that, having failed so completely with the tax authorities in London in the war decade, when they tried again 25 years later, the two "learned presses" turned their browbeating powers, 100-page applications and ancient Latin charters instead on their local tax officials, who, on the documentary evidence so far available, appear to have caved in to their demands without any 1940s-style anlaysis whatever.
| August 2007: JIG UP FOR DIFFERENT TOTAL ANIMALS? At last obtained by Akme: In all their glory, the granted applications by CUP (1975) and OUP (1977) for exemption from UK tax, including the Inland Revenue correspondence and featuring Papa Crass's fuzzy logic, Ooh we are so antiente and so verie spetiall, the Underliner's Case, Blessed be the Biblebaggers, Lord Trumpington Todd's CV, Oxford's Glowing Beams, Shining Torches and Great Latin Pœnis, and many other classic comedy hits, but not featuring their previous rejected applications (CUP 1940, OUP 1952), which they have, er, "recently lost". Click now for the CUP/OUP 1970s Charity Status |
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