Tax Day
Posted by Robert Alt
Those who know me will be happy to know that being 10,000 miles from home did not stop me from doing my yearly ritual of waiting until the last minute to do my taxes. I took my files and my Turbo Tax with me to Baghdad, and just finished my electronic filing. As luck would have it, because of the eight hour time difference, this may be the earliest I have filed a return in years.
11:53 AM / April 15, 2004
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Speaking of taxes, do you know how the tax system works in Iraq? Is there an income tax? Sales tax? How oppressive, if at all, are taxes on the lives of ordinary citizens?
That is a good question, and one for which I do not know the answer. I know that under Saddam the state operated in large measure on a communists system. Thus, electricity and fuel, for example, were commons. But I do not know whether this was funded through aggressive taxation, or through oil revenues (some states in the Middle East such as Kuwait actually have negative taxation--that is, you get a check from the state for being a citizen--based on oil revenues). My guess is that Saddam’s regime ran on a combination of oil and tax, but that is just a guess.