Inland Revenue v Old Monkland Conservative Association
| Jurisdiction | England & Wales |
| Judgment Date | 19 December 1905 |
| Docket Number | No. 3. |
| Date | 19 December 1905 |
| Court | House of Lords |
Earl of Halsbury, Ld. Robertson, Lord Lindley.
Revenue—Income-tax—Exemption—Society of persons.—
The Income-Tax Act, 1842 (5 and 6 Vict. cap. 35), enacts:—Sec. 40. ‘All bodies politic, corporate, or collegiate, companies, fraternities, fellowships, or societies of persons, whether corporate or not corporate, shall be chargeable with such and the like duties as any person will, under and by virtue of this Act, be chargeable with.’
Sec. 163. ‘Provided always that any person charged or chargeable to the duties granted by this Act … who shall prove before the Commissioners for general purposes, in the manner hereinafter mentioned, that the aggregate annual amount of his income is less than £… shall be exempted from the said duties.’
Held (rev. judgment of First Division) that the exemption in sec. 163 applied only to an individual person whose income was under the amount stated, and not to an association.
(In the Court of Session, Nov. 22, 1904, 7 F. 119.)
F. J. Curtis, the Surveyor of Taxes for Coatbridge, Lanarkshire, appealed.
Counsel were heard on 11th December 1905.
After consideration,—
Lord Robertson.—The section primarily and directly under construction is the 163d of the Act of 1842; and it purports to confer an exemption upon persons. ‘Any person charged’ is the recipient of the exemption. This, of course, carries us straight to the charging sections; and in that section which hits the respondents, viz., sec. 40, we find that, while societies (I use this term for shortness) meet the same fate as persons, the scheme of the section is to do this by express enactment, the section holding the two notions, of societies and persons, as antecedently separate, and requiring enactment to bring about their identic treatment in the matter of charge.
In full view of this structure of this charging section, the exempting section, instead of either expressly applying both to persons and to the bodies which are charged in the same way as if they were persons, or adopting some neutral term common to both persons and societies, deliberately adopts one only of the two contrasted classes, and confers the exemption on ‘persons.’ It seems to me that this is decisive of the construction; that societies are purposely left out; and that the persons favoured are persons in the primary sense of the term—the same sense in which the word is used in the 40th section itself.
In this view the Act...
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