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Top 12 weirdest tax rules around the world

Countries across the globe have justified deductions, extra percentages, and wacky ways of coming up with tax revenue. Here's a countdown of the 12 strangest tax laws around the world.

8. Ireland: artist exemption

Peter Morrison/AP
A woman walks past a mural of Northern Ireland golfer Rory McIlroy in the Holylands area of South Belfast, Northern Ireland, July 9, 2012. The mural was painted recently by local artist Danny Devenny which is hoped to be an inspiration to residents in the area.

Want to be a starving artist? You’ll go a little less hungry if you find your muse in Ireland. In order to incentivize the arts, income earned by writers, composers, visual artists and sculptors from the sale of their works is not taxed, under certain circumstances.

Artists must file a claim with Revenue Commissioners, who determine whether the work is original, creative, and has cultural or artistic merit. It also must fit within the five following categories: books or other forms of writing, plays, musical compositions, paintings or other similar pictures, and sculptures.

Wondering how tax people judge art? Here is a sampling of the criteria:

A work has cultural merit if:

  • Its contemplation enhances the quality of individual or social life as a result of its intellectual, spiritual or aesthetic form and content.

A work has artistic merit when:

  • Its combined form and content enhances or intensifies the aesthetic apprehension of those who experience or contemplate it.

The maximum exempt is €40,000.

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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