TY - JOUR
AU - Colley, Robert
AB - Abstract The incidence of white-collar frauds in the tax administration of the eighteen-fifties exposed problems which extended far beyond questions simply about crime and punishment. Rather, they were symptomatic of a growing tension between the state and civil society which found expression in the call for reform of the socio-legal structures and disciplines which permitted them to happen at all. One such episode enables us to glimpse more intimately national concern with, and the obstacles to, law enforcement in this sphere; and how existing criminal and remedial laws were, to some extent, rejected by the agencies of government, not so much on moral or political, as on essentially practical grounds, in favour of less formalized, and more private, ways of dealing with the matter. In October 1859 James Kirkham, a twenty-eight-year-old clerk in the offices of the clerk to the tax commissioners for the metropolitan district of Tower Hamlets, was convicted of forgery and sentenced to six years penal servitude.1 Within days, the surveyor of taxes, the government official who supervised the taxes for the district, absconded, the assessor and collector for Shoreditch, Joseph Henry Jay, was apprehended and imprisoned in Newgate to await trial for obtaining money by false pretences, and other assessors fled or warrants were issued for their arrest. Kirkham had turned informer and exposed a long-standing fraud which involved the key personnel in the income tax administration for the district.2 The scale of Kirkham's crime, which involved forging a signature on a certificate for the redemption of over £1,000 land tax, was as immense as its device was primitive.3 But it is with the case of Jay, one of Kirkham's fellow officers, that this article is largely concerned because it related not to a spontaneous, opportunistic theft but to a planned and relatively well-orchestrated scheme. It echoes the pattern of similar contemporary frauds in Hoxton, Church End and Mile End, in the neighbouring district of Southwark, in the Cornhill and Bassishaw wards of the City of London, and in several other districts in England.4 Cases such as Jay's raised some important questions about what was then still essentially a locally-administered system of taxation. Violation of the law by reasonably well-paid persons of trust in the course of their employment, or what has generally come to be termed white-collar crime, was nothing new to Victorian society.5 But it is only in relatively recent times that scholars, led initially by Edwin Sutherland and later by Gilbert Geis and others, have explored its sociological phenomena and have debated its genesis and progress.6 Much of this debate has focused on the corporate sector – limited companies, banking and the stock market. But white-collar crime occurred, too, in public employments and offices, such as those connected with the raising of taxes, where access to vast sums of money was necessarily entrusted to tax collectors. Jay was responsible for the collection of £17,100 of taxes in 1859 alone.7 Defalcations by these officials, often spectacular in amount and audacity, occurred in many parts of the country during the eighteen-fifties. Some were driven by pecuniary dilemma, like James Worley, a respectable solicitor's clerk, Methodist lay preacher and income tax collector for Dudley, who embezzled £2,000 of taxes, which he loaned, and lost, to a relative;8 some were motivated by opportunistic greed, like John Moah, the collector in Cheshire, who lost over £5,000 of taxes in ‘an unfortunate speculation’.9 But some frauds were the result of carefully laid schemes of deception which persisted over long periods, especially in the City of London and metropolitan districts. While the solution to such malpractice in private concerns was largely a question of self-regulation, its presence in the collection of the public revenue invited questions about the administrative structures which largely permitted it. It is the aim of this article to examine these questions through the material which the case provides. The patterns and processes of white-collar law-breaking are worthy of study in their own right and, to some extent, these will be explored in the light of the Jay case. But to focus on the anatomy of the crime and its perpetrator(s) to the exclusion of the wider socio-political scene would be to overlook the importance of the episode to those who were touched by it in varying degrees. This study moves beyond the frames of reference which would normally conceptualize a discussion on white-collar crime. It will concern itself more with the tensions between localism and centralization in the administration of the income tax. In the mid nineteenth century the relationship between central bureaucracies and local authorities was changing. Until recently, histories of this transformation were theorized in terms of a ‘zero sum game’, involving an approach which took the degree of centralization or localism as the key explanatory factor. Ogborn was among the first to argue that such a simple equation missed the ways in which power relations undergo qualitative transformations.10 By rethinking the relation between nineteenth-century central and local state apparatuses in terms of the historical geography of administrative power, he replaced the question of whether or not, and the degree to which, centralization occurred with a more nuanced analysis of the configurations of power/knowledge.11 Such configurations, Ogborn argued, were shaped by negotiations and actions that were influenced by several variable elements operating at different intensities at different times. These, in turn, were driven by what Burney termed ‘highly permeable oppositions’ which operated ‘not so much in pristine relationships of mutual exclusivity as in ongoing processes of interactive (and provisional) historical definition in which neither of the ostensible poles is in itself stable or complete’.12 From this, it is easy to assume, if only from the vocabulary used to describe these processes, that each step in the ‘negotiations’, whether forwards or sideways, whether stressing centralization or the continuation of local power and autonomy, was propelled by a pro-active force which attempted by some definite action to move things forward. But inertia, at different times by both opposing apparatuses, played an equally important role in deciding the timing and the direction of the change in this relationship. The consequence of these episodes in terms of change was not immediate; there was often a lapse of several years during which other events reinforced or modified the need for change. What actually triggered the shift from one paradigm to another was often not so much a crisis point as an opportune moment when conditions made the hoped-for change possible – for example the death of one of the dramatis personae or an organizational restructuring of a state department. The polarity between localism and centralization in the administration of the income tax can be expressed in terms of balance. As Daunton has recently observed, the limits of local autonomy and central oversight had to be carefully negotiated through a discourse of English liberties and constitutional proprieties.13 The acceptance of the tax by parliament was largely dependent upon the continuing supremacy of the landed oligarchy in its control. This was how the English constitution had worked – policy was agreed between the crown and local élites in parliament and then administered by those élites locally. One of the marks of landed society in the early or mid nineteenth century was the acceptance and discharge of authority and responsibility which the absence of any established apparatus of centralized administration made necessary.14 Peel recognized both of these elements when, upon reintroducing the tax as a temporary measure in 1842, he appealed to the ancient pedigree of its assessment and collection by entrusting it to local parties on the principle that it was thought more consistent with constitutional law that its collection should not depend upon the will of government.15 But it may also be argued that, in one sense, the local parties accepted direct taxation precisely because it gave them the ability to dispense patronage and influence by controlling the process of assessment. It was accepted that an element of evasion in return for consent was a necessary consequence of a system of local autonomy which could never hope to deal adequately with vast numbers of assessments in either organizational or technical terms. But equally it was understood that a degree of professionalization in the execution of the taxing statutes and responsibility to a centrally co-ordinated source were essential if efficiency and cohesion were to be brought to the nationwide collection of the tax. In some ways it is difficult not to entertain a whiggish view that sees a directional change in the process of the administration of the taxes from a local to a central responsibility as rational and progressive. If the gradual ascendancy of the state surveyor of taxes (hereafter called simply the surveyor) in that process (at least looking back from an idealized contemporary model) seems inevitable, the local commissioners who administered the tax may seem to be blinkered and reactionary opponents of reform.16 But this would be to deny the historical integrity of the alternatives, which may have been thought possible and equally rational. On the one hand, the local commissioners saw themselves as the natural safeguard against the excesses of the state and intrusion by ‘an over-mighty executive’.17 And there was a real fear, often publicly expressed, of unfettered powers being vested in the hands of the surveyor. Although by 1860 the office of surveyor was beginning to become professionalized, and a hierarchical system of responsibility and command was emerging, it was still shadowed, at least in popular folklore, by memories of maverick surveyors imposing vexatious surcharges for little reason other than the obtaining of rewards (statutorily they shared in the surcharge);18 of the use of spies and informers (the daily accompaniments of the window tax and the assessed taxes);19 of the sale for profit by surveyors of confidential business information concerning taxpayers' trades, manufactures and professions;20 and of occasions like that in Liverpool in 1848 when the surveyor and collector ‘worked together like trading partners whose only object was to fill their own pockets’.21 The surveyor as Paul Pry, a ‘ferreting person’ and covert government spy, never really went away and this perception was still commonplace in the eighteen-forties and fifties.22 On the other hand, there was the equally prevalent view that, at one extreme, the local commissioners and their appointees treated their positions as sinecures and left the administration of the tax to junior employees or even to the surveyor;23 or that, at the other extreme, they imposed a ‘drumhead discipline’ (one improvised in the field) on the assessment process24– extracting the last penny from the small tradesman while the large merchant escaped with only a light assessment.25 Somewhere in the middle of all this was something which approached reality. The question that vexed contemporaries was whether the local, at times haphazard, system of assessment and collection, with its attendant defects, was preferable to a state-controlled system which would lead inevitably, it was thought (and later was proved correct),26 to higher arbitrary assessments and greater intrusion into private life by the surveyor. The alternative to reform may, therefore, have meant doing nothing. But as long as the local system failed to do anything to improve the situation rather than simply to oppose change, for whatever reason, the ancient machine rumbled on and permitted the same old laxity and irresponsibility to continue. Cases such as Jay's simply let in the light of day and allowed the problems to be seen more clearly. While this article follows the tradition of using a specific case as a way of shedding light on aspects of socio-legal history, as pioneered by Danzig and Simpson, it also follows the approach of Humphrey Jennings in recognizing that events do not exist in isolation; they spring from, merge with and create others, which are often too random or disordered to be readily identifiable as a crucial dimension of the case which is the focus of the study. Several events towards the end of the eighteen-fifties in Tower Hamlets and the City of London, which shadowed the Jay case, together serve as a convenient metaphor for the friction and tensions which attended the advance of a state bureaucracy. The year 1860 was a moment at which the tensions, and the underlying reasons for them, showed themselves with extra clarity; as Jennings put it in his work Pandaemonium, ‘through that clearness [they] can stand as symbols for the whole inexpressible uncapturable process’.27 By this is understood a historical phenomenon, or the unifying of a number of discrete and seemingly disparate events, which is too amorphous to receive precise definition. Tying loosely together a number of separate events attempts to reflect, so far as is ever possible, the collection of attitudes or opinions which were responses to the frictions between traditional, local institutional forms, with the attendant flotsam and jetsam of the previous century or more, and an emerging state bureaucracy. The main antagonists in the scenes visited rehearsed in their ‘curiously personal encounters the massive impersonal encounters of the future’,28 when the tussles would no longer be between personalities but rather between the state and civil society. It is with relationships such as these that this study is largely concerned. And like all other relationships they involve a fluidity which evades analysis if an attempt is made to halt it at a given moment or in any one particular and to anatomize its structure; hence the focus on a series of events in the years immediately preceding and following the Jay incident. Opinions which had hitherto been muttered only in undertones for at least a decade, if not longer, were suddenly vividly, coherently, and at times surprisingly frankly, expressed by the main participants in the system. In the aftermath of the Jay case, there could be discerned a marked directional change in thinking about how taxes were collected, the relationship between centre and locality, and the development of legal process to deal with such administrative offences. The complex web of events which preceded and followed Jay's crime allows us to glimpse more intimately relations between the state and civil society, between central bureaucrats and the local hegemony in 1860, and to understand why the extension of the administrative power of the state in this sphere was a fractured and contested process.29 This article will now turn to the administrative framework of the income tax, essential to any understanding of the system in which Jay moved and worked. The tax machinery was conceptually an inheritance from at least the eighteenth century. It carried a heritage of service by unpaid local commissioners who appointed their own officials to carry out the daily executive tasks of assessment and collection. The income tax was essentially a war tax which had been forged during the wars with France and discontinued after Waterloo. Peel resuscitated it in 1842 as a temporary, emergency measure to finance the tariff reform that was the cornerstone of his free trade programme.30 It was administered in much the same way as the existing land tax and assessed taxes (on windows, carriages, sporting dogs, race horses and armorial bearings). The system relied on service by the local élite as unpaid commissioners, who were, mutatis mutandis, justices of the peace, street or improvement commissioners, Poor Law guardians, members of parliament and land tax commissioners. The tax administration was, thus, intensely localized and almost autonomous, based on geographic districts of each county which had been created in the seventeenth century for the purposes of the first land tax, and which, more or less closely, resembled the hundred divisions.31 Adopted for the purposes of the income tax they were either subdivided or consolidated into larger divisions. The two divisions with which this study is concerned are Tower Hamlets and the City of London. For each division, the land tax commissioners for the county were required to select seven ‘commissioners for the general purposes of the (Taxes) Act’ from among their own number to administer the income tax.32 Called by their shortened title of general commissioners,33 they were mostly local magistrates, bankers, lawyers and Anglican clergymen, and in the larger towns and cities, eminent merchants. Exceptionally in the City of London, extra commissioners were named by the mayor and aldermen, the Bank of England, the East India and South Sea Companies, the Royal Exchange and London Assurance Companies, and the East and West India, London, and St. Katherine Dock Companies.34 The commissioners appointed a clerk to deal with the day-to-day workings of the tax. Usually practising solicitors, many, if not most, of these clerks served additionally as clerk to the magistrates. The commissioners also established a large retinue of as many assessors and collectors as the division comprised parishes, many of whom were local tradesmen. Jay was the assessor appointed for Holywell and Moorfields and Norton Folgate, an area stretching from Shoreditch to Spitalfields and centred on Shoreditch High Street. The taxing statute envisaged that the offices of assessor and collector should be separate. The assessor, as his name suggests, was intended to assess the income of each person liable to the income tax within his geographic jurisdiction. As a general rule, he carried out the preliminary tasks of drawing up lists of persons on whom notices to make a return of income had been served, entered the amounts returned on the assessment lists and made estimates where no return had been made. The collector (ideally having no role in making the assessment or access to taxpayers' return forms) would collect the tax. The theoretical segregation of the executive responsibility of assessment and the collection of taxes was meant to limit the risk of fraudulent practices. But, in reality, this check had gradually been eroded by merging these separate functions. As it was the duty of the assessor to name the collector for the ensuing year, he frequently named himself.35 These offices, for example, were always combined in the division of Tower Hamlets, where George Offor, the chairman of the general commissioners, legitimized the practice by saying, in 1851, that ‘in matters of such secrecy and importance to the peace of the parish we limit as far as possible the number of persons who will have those secrets entrusted to them’.36 Consequently, Jay was the collector of taxes for the same area where he had jurisdiction as assessor. Trustworthiness and respectability in the eyes of the local community were evidently the hallmarks of employment in this area, and the pervasive mentality which permitted such a practice was really based on the ‘outward dominance of morality’37 that could not contemplate disreputable behaviour by respected officers. However, such plurality may have been driven as much by the desire to create a more lucrative office as by the need to maintain secrecy, since merging the separate functions doubled the remuneration. In 1860 in the City of London and metropolitan divisions, where many of these officers remained in place for years, at least thirty-eight per cent of such offices were combined, and if apparently familial positions are included, the figure rises to sixty-six per cent.38 Of course, there had to be some central monitoring of the processes, particularly in order to protect the timely collection of the tax. For this purpose, about 140 salaried surveyors were appointed by and were responsible to the Board of Inland Revenue (hereafter called simply the Board).39 Although the surveyor was permitted a limited involvement in the process of assessment, the local commissioners were supreme in deciding the amount of the assessment and in the administration of the tax.40 In collection matters the surveyor acted as a monitor to ensure that the taxes were paid to a central source by the times stipulated and that arrears were properly dealt with. There was one exception to the general rule that assessments were made by the assessor. The problem arose when it came to the assessment of the commercial community: the assessor was usually a small tradesman and as such his own interests might clash with those of the crown, or favoured customers might be omitted from the assessment lists.41 In the case of the Lambeth Bathing House, for example, the assessor and collector was one of its chief shareholders and for several years ‘always gave out that the profits were sufficient only to cover working expenses’, thereby, as it was later established, saving the business tax of £141.42 Making estimates of the incomes of businesses of some importance in the district was considered to be too complex, or too delicate, a task to be left to the assessors43 and the general commissioners were required to select two additional commissioners for this purpose – invariably two of their own number.44 The assessors still carried out the preliminary duties, entering the sums returned on the assessment lists prior to review by the additional commissioners. The main function of the latter was to judge the sufficiency of the income returned or to make an estimated assessment either where they were dissatisfied with the sufficiency of that sum, or in the absence of a return.45 They were in effect a blunt instrument tackling under-assessment.46 The surveyor was present when the additional commissioners considered the returns and estimates and could comment on their sufficiency. In Tower Hamlets, however, the checks and balances envisaged by the statute were largely ignored. The additional commissioners carried out their assessing function cursorily and the clerk, as the Board's solicitor commented, generally showed a ‘uniform neglect of the duties of his office which were principally transacted by Kirkham … (the later convicted felon) … and other clerks of humbler grade in his employ’.47 The surveyor for Tower Hamlets, Charles Levien, exploited this lack of oversight and persuaded Jay to suppress the true returns of a number of tradesmen and to enter much lower figures in the assessment lists, so that the amount of tax legally assessed was much lower than that properly payable. As Jay was also collector, he was able to collect the tax that would have been payable on the true return and account to the Board for only the tax assessed on the substituted amounts, sharing the difference with Levien. The segregation of the offices of assessor and collector was meant to lessen the likelihood of this type of fraud, since collusion between the separate officials would have been a necessary precursor to its success, but in Tower Hamlets such safeguards were ignored. There are a number of examples which illustrate the fraud at work.48 John Rose, a tea-dealer and grocer who had three shops in Shoreditch, made a return of income for each year from 1855 to 1858 in sums of £1,000, £1,180, £1,600 and £1,500 respectively. In total, £223 5s 0d income tax was properly payable and this sum was collected by Jay. But the assessments were made in sums of £500 for each year, yielding tax of just £91 13s 4d. This lower amount was accounted for to the Board and £131 11s 8d was pocketed. Rose's foreman, Joseph Stevenson, also made returns of his salary of £150 for each of the same four years but no assessment was made and tax of £27 10s 0d was collected and retained. In the case of White Brothers, tobacconists of Holywell Street, their returns of income showing annual profits ranging from £2,600 to £2,900 were suppressed and assessments made at £1,000 each year from 1855 to 1858. Tax of £312 1s 8d was embezzled. The sum of £145 12s 4d was similarly obtained from James Hill, tobacconist, and £111 19s 6d from Walters, a silk merchant of Wilson Street. The amount embezzled from these and other businessmen totalled £803 18s 10d, but Kirkham, who was employed in the same office as Jay, alleged (and the Board considered these allegations to be well-founded) that a further £1,100 had been appropriated between 1854 and 1856, together with an undisclosed sum for 1857. The additional commissioners did not question the evidently estimated sums which were repeated year after year in these cases. It is improbable, in any case, that they could have reviewed the many thousands of assessments made annually within their jurisdiction in any but the most summary of ways. The anatomy of Jay's crime is central to this discussion. The detailed papers in the case, which reveal far more than the evidence put forward at his trial, enable us not only to understand how the crime was committed but to approach more closely many factors which the public record alone does not permit. For example, what sums were involved? Statistics for white-collar crime are generally comprised of ostensibly small offences, at least in monetary terms.49 Because of the difficulty of detection and, more importantly, of proof, the extent, and consequently the actual amount, of embezzlement was often not disclosed at trial. The counts on which Jay was tried, too, at first appear trivial. The total amount of the tax involved in the offences brought to trial was £24. But it becomes apparent from a closer examination of the pre-trial papers that the true amount was at least £2,000.50 How was he punished? Jay was indicted for obtaining money by false pretences but was acquitted at the central criminal court through lack of evidence.51 A subsequent prosecution under a regulatory Taxes Management Act was made, but stayed on payment of a proportion of the amount embezzled. Thus, there may be another layer of penality beyond the public record of the criminal trial, involving practices and procedures which often took place in private between the offender and the Board. And, finally, was Jay a scapegoat? Those, like Jay, who were prosecuted may not have been the architects of the crimes – they were often those who could not move sufficiently quickly ‘to a milder climate’ to escape arrest. If so, who was the real villain of the piece? Although Jay and other assessors and collectors were prosecuted, the arch offender was Charles Levien, the government surveyor and presumably the main beneficiary of the fraud, who absconded and was never brought to trial. How much more extensive the frauds were is difficult to establish with certainty. The public record alone of cases such as these may be an unreliable base from which to measure the magnitude, or the frequency, of such crimes. It is probable that the true levels of fraud were much greater. Proof of embezzlement could be obtained only by comparing the receipts for tax paid with the assessments made. This may seem self-evident, but receipts for the payment of tax were often discarded after the year of assessment and the returns, the assessment record and any other official papers were also generally destroyed.52 The legislation which placed the custody of official tax papers in the hands of the general commissioners was not directed at a long-term retention and once the tax for the year had been paid, the returns and assessments, or any documentation which emanated from them, no longer served any purpose.53 Even papers or abstracts taken by the surveyor were rarely kept for longer than three years and were then usually incinerated.54 The assessment lists were not yet records in the sense that they had a secondary purpose over and above their limited function as the means of arriving at the collection of the tax for the year. They possessed no connotative quality beyond the immediate purpose for which they were created, for example in providing an information base which might be used to detect under-assessment over a period of time. There was not yet the desire or the manpower to collect and organize local information for the purpose of better control, or to use data as a longer-term record of assessment.55 What circumstances permitted Jay's fraud? It is perhaps too easy to focus on the perpetrator alone in seeking an answer to this question. The architect of the frauds in which Jay was but one of several accomplices was the surveyor, Charles Levien, a respected official who had been chosen to give evidence before the Hume Committee on the income tax in 1851.56 Levien orchestrated the crimes and drew in the assessors, fearful of losing their jobs, under the threat of finding fault with their work. The direct cause of the fraud must, therefore, be attributable to his own psychological and sociological condition. But it was the administrative structure of the income tax which fostered the environment in which behaviour such as this could flourish. The statutory network of responsibility and check between the assessors, collectors, clerks and commissioners ought to have been sufficient to prevent fraud. But in the absence of supervision by the clerk over the administration of the tax, and in light of the summary ways in which the additional commissioners, in certain important regards, approached their duties, Levien was able to indulge in a degree of unfettered influence over the assessment and collection process far beyond that granted by statute. When something went wrong it may, superficially, have been the fault of a few rotten apples in an otherwise faultless crop but, fundamentally, it was symptomatic of a much deeper-rooted malaise which pervaded the income tax administration. The defects and abuses in the system stemmed mainly from the retention of institutions and practices that were largely out of date by 1860 and sustained only by certain of the commissioners, through the vested interest of their clerks, who feared that change would lead to the loss of patronage. ‘Old corruption’, or in general terms, the system of patronage through the granting of sinecures, pensions and emoluments to those who were useful to government, had been in retreat since the early part of the nineteenth century. But beyond the political influence of the crown, there existed in the administration of the income tax the secondary or indirect fruits of previous corruption – various sinecures and pluralist offices, like the post of clerk, which were in the gift of the general commissioners. These may have ceased to be political appointments – although the political complexion of the recipients was perhaps still a factor – but the ethos of patronage lingered even as late as 1860. As one newspaper commented in 1857, the ‘Commissioners frequently appoint as their officers, political or personal friends and think perhaps more of thus exercising their patronage than of the public good’.57 Although the statutory duties of the clerk to the commissioners appeared substantial, in reality they were often delegated to junior employees.58 Appointed by and remaining in office at the pleasure of the general commissioners, the clerks were remunerated by poundage (that is, at a rate of so many pence in the pound) on the amount of tax assessed. Their offices could be ‘inordinately lucrative’, especially when the rates of tax rose without any corresponding increase in workload. Men such as John Humphreys, clerk to the Tower Hamlet commissioners, and Richard Till, clerk to the City of London commissioners, could expect substantial rewards.59 Till's remuneration, in particular, was the subject of almost annual adverse criticism in the press during the eighteen-fifties, being reputedly greater than that of the prime minister, the chancellor of the exchequer or the chief justice of England.60 In 1854, for example, his rewards totalled £7,205 and in 1855, £7,752, which, even after paying his six assistants £1,071 and office expenses of £400, left him with a remarkable sum.61 His duties, on which it was alleged by Edward Welsh, the surveyor for the City of London, that he spent no more than two hours a week, were ‘nearly all discharged by deputy’.62 The secretary to the Board described his regard to the business of taxes, from which he derived such a large emolument, as ‘occasional and perfunctory’. John Humphreys, too, earned some £1,700 in the same year,63 while displaying what the Board described as a ‘uniform neglect’ of his duties as clerk.64 These lucrative positions were often no more than ancillary to other, and probably the main, occupations of the recipients. Humphreys, for example, was a successful solicitor,65 often acting for railway companies,66 and a parliamentary agent,67 as well as being coroner for East Middlesex,68 the latter position alone providing a salary of some £2,000 and costs of over £5,000.69 He was later appointed senior coroner for Middlesex and was knighted by Queen Victoria in 1881.70 Till also occupied many positions – in addition to being clerk to the commissioners of the income tax, land tax and assessed taxes, he was a director of the East Kent and Norfolk Railways (and allegedly, at some time, of the East Suffolk Railway), a director of the Rock Insurance Company, and connected with the Electric Telegraph Company and the Lowestoft Harbour Board.71 He occupied the position of clerk to the commissioners for the City of London for over fifty years before his death in 1865. Some assessors and collectors, too, received poundage equivalent to the salary of an assistant secretary of state72– W. Ogilvie and David Harker, for example, in the City of London, received sums as great as £1,500 and £1,000 respectively. Harker was also crier of the Old Bailey and toastmaster.73 Officers such as Jay received a more modest, but nevertheless relatively comfortable, remuneration of about £200 a year, although in 1855 his poundage increased to over £400 when the rate of tax increased.74 In the eighteenth century, even petty offices carried with them unofficial perks and privileges and the post-holders had been expected to augment their wages by whatever means their imagination and circumstances permitted. To some extent this kind of thinking still permeated the tax system at a local level, where unofficial (and at times seemingly unlawful) perks were prevalent. For example, the clerks in Till's office sold favours to appellants in the form of tickets for appeal hearings: the junior clerks would enter an appellant's name higher up the appeal list on payment of a fee.75 Assessors, too, would use their position to promote their own calling, especially those who undertook private debt collection and advertized their status as collector of the public taxes as being a ‘great facility’.76 And the assessors and collectors were sometimes employed by the clerk to the commissioners as clerks in his office, so diminishing the effects of the statutory disciplines which segregated the assessment and collection of the income tax: Till, in the late eighteen-fifties, employed two assessors (one of whom was also a collector) in his office as clerks of the land and assessed taxes.77 Another source of profit to minor employees was the disposal of confidential tax papers as waste paper to shopkeepers. Perhaps the most striking incidence of this was in Till's own office in 1857 when Eliza Winslow, a charwoman who was employed to light the fires, took and sold taxpayers' returns. Between 1,000 and 1,200 were recovered from the waste paper dealers and fishmongers of Billingsgate who had used them to wrap fish.78 It is true that Winslow was prosecuted for theft at Till's own expense,79 but this was largely the result of the bitter and personal animosity which Surveyor Welsh directed towards Till, who exploited the Winslow affair to highlight the neglect of duty that he tried to expose time and again – Till was more or less forced to respond. The Winslow case was not an isolated example. Used paper, printed or written on, was a marketable commodity, much in demand for a great variety of domestic and commercial uses. If the tax papers no longer possessed value as a record of assessment, they did possess value as waste paper. Returns and assessments were used freely in the wrapping of butter, cheese, fish and other domestic commodities in various parts of London: a butcher at King's Cross purchased nearly the whole of the income tax returns for the parishes of St. Mary, Islington and St. Luke in 1848;80 and a grocer near Brixton purchased several large bales of returns, schedules and claims for exemption in 1851.81 All of this indicates a culture of laxity and free enterprise that was the antithesis of the disciplines of assessment and collection envisaged by the statute, and one which facilitated opportunities for malpractice and fraud in the absence of any meaningful bureaucracy. The Board made regular, piecemeal attempts to remedy the situation but opposition from the metropolitan districts, and the City of London in particular, was too strong. These districts boasted some of the most influential and powerful commissioners and clerks in the country, and it was from them (and especially from the clerks) that the most vehement opposition to reform emanated. ‘The Clerks hold monthly meetings and as soon as any change is contemplated they are alert for the purpose of opposing it.’82 In 1860 the Board still felt it necessary to assuage opposition to even small measures of reform by stating that it did not seek to lessen the patronage of the local commissioners.83 It seems likely that the system was sustained not only because of the observance of the ‘constitutional principle’ that the tax should be assessed by local parties but because of a nexus of local patronage, power and money. The crucial questions which exercised contemporary minds were not those of who committed what crime and whether prevention could be achieved by more stringent legal sanctions, but of how it could have been perpetrated in the first instance and whether there should be a reappraisal of the administrative structures which permitted it to happen at all. The administration of the income tax throws into sharp contrast the relation between the emerging civil service and the older order and way of dealing with the collection of taxes. On the one hand, its administration was still, in 1860, based largely on amateur service by the local and wealthy oligarchy, a practice which perpetuated and relied upon a system of patronage and placing for its day-to-day workings. But it maintained the principle that the collection of tax was essentially a local responsibility, and hence ensured the continuing acceptance of the tax by parliament. On the other hand, the Board boasted of its recruitment selection by competitive examination and remuneration by salary alone;84 the surveyor's training in tax law and practice was ideally suited to increasing central influence in the assessment process, but acts of dishonesty, like that designed by Levien, only served to validate the commissioners' hostility to the extension of central power. Despite his involvement as the arch-villain of the piece, the inertia of the local administrative apparatus emerges as the factor which, perhaps more than anything else, permitted such crimes to occur at all. The relationship between locality and centre was also being brought into question with regard to how those who committed crimes such as Jay's were punished. Jay was tried at the central criminal court for obtaining money by false pretences but was acquitted because of lack of evidence. The difficulty was really one of taxonomy: Jay's unlawful act did not fit precisely the definition of the crime for which he was indicted, as his defence successfully argued, and a charge of conspiring to defraud the Inland Revenue might have been more appropriate. However, as the solicitor to the Board observed, the clerk Humphreys, as a crucial witness, was in any case virtually useless because of the complete ignorance which he displayed of the running of his office. It was sometimes necessary to approach the matter differently. Paradoxically, this was possible because of the prevailing rule that tax defaults were dealt with initially on a local basis. The parish was answerable for its collector, and consequently for the tax lost as a result of his actions. There was legal authority for the parish to be re-assessed on the whole amount of the default, thereby restoring the Board to its correct financial position.85 Between 1842 and 1858, sixty-nine parishes were dealt with in this manner, including some substantial re-assessments in London – for example, £2,306 in Bassishaw Ward, £2,507 in Greenwich and £2,640 in Newington.86 This archaic practice effectively punished the victims by re-assessing those who had already paid their taxes. Re-assessment was strategically significant in the advance of the state control of taxes: it reinforced painfully the defects of local collection and invoked petitions to the Board to absolve parishes from the burden it brought. If the Board was asked implicitly to assume the ultimate responsibility for default (and the petitions from parishes to the Board to absolve them from re-assessment were an expression of this), then why should it not be responsible for collection in the first place? Frauds like Jay's seemed to be a persuasive reason for transferring responsibility for collection to a central body so that the offices of assessor and collector would be entirely separate. It was on this premise that, in May 1860, the Board launched a proposal for control over the process of collection.87 But cases such as Jay's posed a slightly different conundrum for the Board. All of the tax that had been legally assessed had been collected and accounted for: it was the tax on profits omitted from assessment that had been embezzled. In strict terms, how could the parish be re-assessed for an amount which had not been legally assessed in the first instance but had been unlawfully collected and retained?88 The taxpayer had correctly declared his income and paid the correct amount of tax; it was the legal assessment that was deficient. Part of the solution to this problem lay in a Management Act of 1803, which still in 1860 largely governed the income tax administration. This defined, as a specific offence, collecting money from persons not charged with the tax and not paying it over to the Board. A penalty of £100 could be imposed for each such offence.89 While the day-to-day execution of the tax lay in local hands, its overall care and management, including prosecution, was reposed in the Board. Laws such as that arising from the act of 1803 were legislatively created, in derogation of common law principles, and were remedial in nature, so that the correction of existing illegalities rather than the repression of the violator was the goal.90 So where collectors embezzled taxes, whether legally assessed or not, the aim of the regulatory law was to recoup as much of the loss as possible through a mix of re-assessment, fines, the sale of seized goods, payments from sureties, or by coming to other arrangements with the perpetrator.91 The conventional criminal code, as the legislative expression of ‘natural’ crimes, mala in se, such as forgery in the case of Kirkham, was followed in some instances; and prosecutions in respect of the legislatively-created specific crimes, mala prohibita, such as not accounting for taxes improperly collected, as in the case of Jay, in others. The difficulty lies in identifying where the cross-over point lay between the two. It is evident from the Jay case that regulatory laws were used either where the criminal conviction had failed or where success would be unlikely because of the difficulty in proving the crucial mens rea under the criminal code.92 Remedial laws seem to have been experienced both as auxiliary or secondary measures, and also as principal measures. The choice of which route to take was often not a matter of jurisprudential distinction but a mix of realism and departmental policy which sought, on the one hand, to make use of exemplary prosecutions as a deterrent to others and, on the other hand, to maximize the tax collected and perhaps, in cases where it was appropriate to re-assess, to mitigate the burden on the parish. The boundaries between which act should be punished under the criminal law and which under regulatory law were defined not so much on moral as on essentially practical grounds. The legal processes to deal with such offences seem to have developed on largely pragmatic premises, by which the Board aligned its discretionary legal powers with its administrative goals. It may be argued that the economic and social structures which characterized the tax system, within which men such as Jay worked, determined the way in which the solution developed. The desire to correct economic wrongs, to prevent public injury and to secure a large revenue may have directed it. Using regulatory law as a coercive instrument to secure restitution of lost tax was a method over which the Board had control, in which it could ‘bluff, bully and cajole’93 to achieve its desired end. It was less formalized, less ritualistic, and the Board could decide when to go and when to stop. It was simply more convenient, less prone to the application of a clever defence and free from the onerous burden of proof required by the criminal law. What was needed was a speedier and essentially private method in which the Board was largely unhindered in implementing its management function. The site of penality was moving from a local to a central source. After acquittal at the central criminal court, Jay was prosecuted in the court of exchequer under the act of 1803 on (perhaps over-zealously) ten separate counts, each potentially resulting in a penalty of £100.94 The prosecution was used in a Damocletian sense and stayed or revived at various stages in the process in order to coerce restitution of as much as possible of the lost tax. Jay paid most of the arrears for 1858–9 without the case being heard in the court of exchequer.95 That earlier years were not pursued, however, perhaps demonstrates a limit to the effectiveness of regulatory laws. However Draconian the statutory expression of penality may have been, it was bounded by the pocket of the offender, his family, his friends and his sureties. Even regulatory laws were often only imperfectly realized because of the practical limits to their effectiveness. Since, ultimately, the aim of the statute was to collect the true amount of tax, the solution appeared to lie not in stricter legal sanctions, which would do little more than perpetuate the existing system, but in a reappraisal of the administrative structures within which such frauds were perpetrated; and in defining a system of bureaucratic responsibility. In 1853 the nature of the income tax had changed from being a primarily temporary imposition to a longer-term feature of the fiscal scene.96 The onset of the Crimean War made possible an increasing drive towards national involvement in responding to defects and abuses in the system, as it became necessary to raise higher taxes to prosecute the war. What had hitherto been in essence a local matter, with the parish being responsible for both assessment and re-assessment, became a national one as the government needed to control the collection of tax during wartime and consequently to exercise control over the collection personnel. This seemed only a short step away from the surveyor, himself, becoming the pivotal figure in the process of assessment. Indeed, in The Times of 1855, one informed correspondent, commenting that Till's irresponsibility in the City of London, and the sheer want of officials, was costing the government between £50,000 and £100,000 a year in lost revenue, seemed to invite this as a solution.97 But there were fears about the surveyor's unbridled zeal for indiscriminate, and potentially high, assessments. These fears were fully realized by 1856 when, in attempts to increase assessments at the same time as the rate of tax was more than doubled to finance the Crimean War, surveyors in many parts of the country were successful in urging greater increases on the commissioners. In those districts where the commissioners acquiesced, protest meetings organized across a wide spectrum of the trading, manufacturing and professional communities revealed both the extent of the practice and public hostility to it.98 Meetings of the most influential anti-income tax associations put the seal on an agitation which, if perseveringly fought, might terminate the tax. The Board had to retreat for the moment to a less aggressive position. The Board's desire to strengthen its hand in the collection of the income tax required a piecemeal approach, beginning with an attempt to segregate the offices of assessor and collector. In May 1860 all general commissioners were circularized by the Board with the object of ascertaining their views on giving increased powers to the surveyor,99 framed in terms of diminishing the occurrence of frauds in collection. The Board once again dismissed fears of any desire on its part to draw to itself the patronage which belonged to the commissioners, although the proposals entailed the Board's appointing assessors and collectors to deal with preliminary matters of assessment, as well as dealing with collection, and required that the surveyor issue notices of all charges in respect of estimated assessments (the function of the additional and general commissioners was left virtually intact). This streamlined the process by reducing the number of documents generated, the amount of copying and the degree of examination required, and lessened the commission of frauds. In England and Wales, 563 out of the 693 divisions responded. Of these, 258 favoured the move, 240 did not and sixty-five adopted a neutral position. Although this response seems largely to have supported the proposals, those in favour were mainly the rural and small urban divisions where the poundage was incommensurate with the time and effort of collection. The greatest opposition came from the City of London and metropolitan districts. Here, out of the thirty-four divisions, only three were in favour and one neutral. Both Tower Hamlets and the City opposed the proposals. As the Board commented, the terms in which the adverse opinion was conveyed were sufficiently strong and intransigent to lead to the conclusion that any measure of this kind would encounter the most vehement opposition in parliament. The proposals were dropped. In 1864 the Board sponsored a bill empowering it to appoint collectors but again it had to be withdrawn in the face of similar opposition.100 However, the way in which the London commissioners approached matters was changing. It was only a slight change, but nevertheless seems to have deflected some of the criticism which emanated from the Board at this time. The fifty-year sway of Till ended with his death in 1865 and the general commissioners chose as his successor Charles Senior, almost immediately prior to this a surveyor of taxes. He had begun his career in Dorset in 1842,101 had gained a keen investigative reputation in Birmingham in the late eighteen-fifties,102 and had written and published a handbook on the income tax in 1863.103 He was a professional tax practitioner, of high moral tone, who could impose order on the division through the authority which stemmed from his expertise and reputation; but at the same time he was entirely responsible to the local commissioners. The appointment of an ex-government official as clerk by the general commissioners went some way to achieving, indirectly, what the Board had tried unsuccessfully to do. It was a compromise by the City of London commissioners and another example of the strategic negotiations which took place in the administration of the taxes. There were also subtle changes in the Board's approach. In 1862 a new office, that of chief inspector, was created. Its first incumbent subdivided the City of London tax district into three different units, each with a separate surveyor.104 Welsh, the tireless critic of Till, remained in one of these for almost a decade.105 Between 1862 and 1865, as a result of ‘the improved and more methodical system … under which the Surveyors now work[ed]’, the profits assessed to the income tax in the City rose by fifty-eight per cent.106 From about 1860, too, most surveyors were changed regularly, never remaining long enough in any district to court collusion with local personnel. By 1863 the secretary to the Board could describe the surveyor as a bird of passage.107 The nature of the state tax official was changing: where once he had lived in the locality for much of his working life, now he was a more impersonal figure. He was becoming the personification of the Board, synonymous with the revenue department and part of the state machine.108 The episodes discussed in this article reveal some of the reasons for both the inertia and the strategic negotiations which, at various times, lay behind the gradual encroachment by the state on the local administration of the income tax. It was a painfully slow process and would continue to be so for several decades. The hold of the local commissioners on the reins of assessment was relaxed in only an ad hoc fashion. In isolation, the Jay case may seem just another example of white-collar crime but when viewed in the perspective of contiguous events, it has a resonance far beyond its own intrinsic and superficial characteristics. At the beginning of this article an oblique reference was made to a remark by Humphrey Jennings in his work Pandaemonium, which signalled a move beyond the specifics of Jay's offence in order to glimpse what was termed an ‘uncapturable process’, a metaphor for the frictions and tensions which attended the advance of a state bureaucracy. The events surrounding the Jay case help to guide us towards an understanding of this process. It was both a symptom of the need for reform and a catalyst for a central challenge to local supremacy. Opportunity and opportunism were essential factors in moving the process forward. Of course, to suggest a unique causal relationship between the Jay case and the changes wrought during the early eighteen-sixties would be irresponsible and open to deserved criticism. It was a more protracted, nuanced and complex evolution in which both inertia and active strategic negotiations played their part. But the events which both preceded and followed the incident help to focus attention on the prevailing concerns of the time about the relation between central and local control of the income tax, and the responses to attempts at reform. Jay was but an outward expression of the need for reform, and the events which shadowed the case were the response to that need. Footnotes * The author is grateful to R. W. Ireland of the department of law, University of Wales, Aberystwyth, for his encouragement and support in producing this article, for reading the final draft, and for his suggestions for improvement. He is grateful, too, for the observations of an anonymous referee. Any remaining deficiencies are entirely the author's own. Thanks are also due to Angela James for her help in producing the computerized version of the article. The wider aspects of the mid-Victorian income tax are treated in R. J. Colley, ‘The clown's mistress. Income tax evasion: ideal and reality in mid-Victorian Britain relating to the detection of and punishment for evading the income tax’ (unpublished University of Wales, Aberystwyth Ph.D. thesis, 1998). 1 The Times, 29 Oct. 1859. 2 The National Archives of the U.K.: Public Record Office, IR 40/1093, Attorney-General v Jay (hereafter Attorney-General v Jay), reports by William Garnett, 1 Nov. 1859, Joseph Timm, 20 Dec. 1859 and William Garnett, 13 Feb. 1860; The Times, 15 Dec. 1859. 3 The Times, 29 Oct. 1859. 4 1st Rept. from the Select Committee on Income and Property Tax together with the Minutes of Evidence (hereafter Hume Committee 1 Evidence) (Parl. Papers 1852 (354), ix), qq. 1032, 2717; Report from the Select Committee on the Inland Revene and Customs Establishments (hereafter I.R. and C.E. 1 Evidence) (Parl. Papers 1862 (370), xii), qq. 2424, 2464. 5 G. Robb, White-Collar Crime in Modern England: Financial Fraud and Business Morality, 1845–1929 (Cambridge, 1992), esp. p. 3, where Robb observes that the ‘Victorians themselves were plagued by white-collar crime as no other people before or since’. 6 The term ‘white-collar crime’ became part of the English language when Edwin Sutherland gave his presidential address to the American Sociological Society in 1939 (see E. Sutherland ‘White collar criminality’, in G. Geis and R. F. Meier, White Collar Crime: Offenses in Business, Politics and the Professions (1977); N. Shover and J. P. Wright, Crimes of Privilege: Readings in White Collar Crime (Oxford, 2001)). 7 Attorney-General v Jay, calculations attached to letter of 29 Aug. 1860 from Messrs. Digby & Sharp to T. Sargent. The assessed taxes were collectively the taxes on windows, sporting dogs, race horses, carriages, servants and armorial bearings. 8 Shrewsbury Chronicle, 26 Sept. 1856. 9 Chester Chronicle, 2 Feb. 1856. Moah is described as collector of the income tax in Cheshire but in an earlier reference in the Chester Chronicle (12 Aug. 1854) he is called the receiving officer for Chester, an appointment of the Board of Stamps and Taxes to gather in the taxes over a wide area. 10 M. Ogborn, ‘Local power and state regulation in 19th-century Britain’ , Trans. Institute of British Geographers , new ser., xvii ( 1992 ), 215 – 26 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close 11 Ogborn, esp. pp. 216, 223. 12 I. A. Burney, Bodies of Evidence: Medicine and the Politics of the English Inquest, 1830–1926 (2000), p. 2. See also R. Colley, ‘Railways and the mid-Victorian income tax’ , Jour. Transport Hist. , xxiv ( 2003 ), 78 – 102 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , esp. pp. 79–80. 13 M. J. Daunton, Trusting Leviathan: the Politics of Taxation in England 1799–1914 (Cambridge, 2001), p. 194. 14 F. M. L. Thompson, English Landed Society in the 19th Century (1963), p. 8. 15 Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, 3rd ser., lxi (18 March 1842), col. 911. 16 See C. Emsley, Crime and Society in England, 1750–1900 (1987), p. 11, for the whig view of progress in the criminal justice system and esp. the interesting parallels in the theory of Rusche and Kirchheimer, and later of Michel Foucault. 17 Daunton, p. 203. 18 E.g., Edward Welsh received the following sums: £307, £258, £220 and £254 in 1827, 1828, 1829 and 1830 respectively (An Account of the Amount of Per-centage allowed to Surveyors of Assessed Taxes (Parl. Papers 1833 (303), xxxii), p. 2 re. Kent). Under the Act 5 & 6 Vic., c. 35, s. 162, surveyors were also entitled to a moiety of penalties imposed on appeals against surcharges (T.N.A.: P.R.O., IR 40/799 records such moieties payable to Richard Hedgeman, surveyor at Birmingham in 1859). 19 This is also reminiscent of Pitt's income tax of 1799, which was characterized by its network of spies, informers and ‘sharpers’ (swindlers) and which itself raised fears about the kind of state surveillance that would have been the perceived result of a French invasion. 20 E.g., the sale of confidential papers by the surveyor in Westminster in 1816 as waste paper (Hansard, Parliamentary Debates, xxxiii (11 March 1816), col. 126). Attempts to sell information about taxpayers' assessments had been made as late as 1872; ex-Revenue officials, previously employed in the office of the special commissioners of income tax advertized the sale of details of individuals' assessments (The Times, 20 Dec. 1872; Pall Mall Gazette, 17 Dec. 1872). 21 Liverpool Mercury, 4 Jan. 1848. There were several instances of surveyors being involved in similar frauds recorded in the Board's circulars to surveyors in the 1840s and 1850s. The author is grateful to Stephen Matthews for drawing his attention to a collection of these circulars, the Henzell collection (which until recently was in private hands), and for his generosity in providing copies of the circulars to which reference is made. The collection has now been deposited at the Chester Record Office. (The surveyors involved were Goode (1844) (Chester Record Office, D6148 (38)); Thompson (1844) (D6148 (39)); Robinson (1847) (D6148 (60)); Gates (1847) (D6148 (63)); and Clarke (1854) (D6148 (99).) 22 The Spectator, 29 Nov. 1856. For contemporary commentary on the surveyor of taxes as spy, see R. Colley, ‘Mid-Victorian employees and the taxman: a study in information gathering by the state in 1860’ , Oxford Jour. Legal Studies , xxi ( 2001 ), 593 – 608 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close 23 The Times, 11 Sept. 1855; I.R. and C.E. 1 Evidence, qq. 2409, 2411; Correspondence upon the Subject of the Abstraction of Income Tax Returns in the City of London (hereafter Sale of Waste Paper) (Parl. Papers 1857–8 (153), xxxiv), pp. 1–2, correspondence of Thomas Keogh to commissioners of income tax for the City of London, 13 Feb. 1858; The Times, 27 Jan. 1873. 24 The Times, 19 Jan. 1843; Liverpool Mercury, 24 Aug. 1843; Chester Chronicle, 29 Nov. 1856. 25 See, particularly, Colley, ‘The clown's mistress’, ch. 5, at pp. 139–44; Hansard, 3, clvii (30 March 1860), cols. 1670–1. 26 As early as 1856, for example, in Gloucester, where trade had been depressed because of its dependency on commerce with places blockaded by the allied fleets, the new surveyor ‘commenced his career with a reckless and unscrupulous surcharge upon all classes’, echoing similar protests in towns and cities throughout the country (Liverpool Daily Post, 26 Nov. 1856, p. 7d). There are reports almost daily in The Times between Nov. 1856 and Jan. 1857. For a similar experience in the later Exeter tax rebellion of 1871, see C. Stebbings, ‘Popular perceptions of income tax law in the 19th century: a local tax rebellion’ , Jour. Legal Hist. , xxii ( 2001 ), 45 – 71 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close 27 H. Jennings, Pandaemonium 1660–1886: the Coming of the Machine as Seen by Contemporary Observers (1985), p. xxxvi. 28 E. P. Thompson, The Making of the English Working Class (1963; repr. 1984), p. 21 gives John Thelwall's account of his interrogation by the privy council concerning the seditious practices of the corresponding societies. 29 See also F. Driver, Power and Pauperism: the Workhouse System 1834–84 (Cambridge, 1993), esp. p. 9. 30 5 & 6 Vic., c. 35. 31 1 W. & M., c. 20, s. 5; 1 W. & M., c. 1, s. 5; there were 693 divisions in England and Wales (numbers confirmed in Circular Letter addressed by the Board of Inland Revenue to the District Commissioners of Taxes … 16th May 1860 … And … Observations of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue (hereafter Observations on Circular Letter) (Parl. Papers 1871 (462), xxxvii), p. 8). 32 5 & 6 Vic., c. 35, s. 4. 33 A. Farnsworth locates the origins in a sidenote to an act of 1799, 39 Geo. III, c. 22, s. 14 ( A. Farnsworth, ‘The income tax commissioners’ , Law Quarterly Rev. , lxiv ( 1948 ), 372 – 88 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at p. 373. 34 5 & 6 Vic., c. 35, s. 5. 35 The Times, 17 Nov. 1856, p. 11f; Report from the Select Committee on the Inland Revenue and Customs Establishment (hereafter I.R. and C.E. 2 Evidence) (Parl. Papers 1863 (424), vi), q. 282. 36 Hume Committee 1 Evidence, qq. 2492–3, George Offor, chairman of Board of Commissioners for Tower Hamlets. 37 Emsley, p. 122. 38 Statistics compiled from a return of persons employed as assessors and collectors of income tax and land and assessed taxes in the City of London and metropolitan districts for the year ending 5 Apr. 1861 (A Return of the Names of all Persons Employed as Assessors or Collectors of Income Tax, and Land and Assessed Taxes in the Metropolitan Districts, for the year ending 31 March 1861 (hereafter Assessors and Collectors) (Parl. Papers 1862 (374), xxx), pp. 1–9). 39 Compiled from returns from each survey in England and Wales to the Hume Committee for the year ending 5 Apr. 1849 (2nd Rept. from the Select Committee on Income and Property Tax together with the Minutes of Evidence (hereafter Hume Committee 2 Evidence) (Parl. Papers 1852 (510), ix), pp. 405–9). 40 Peel was careful to impress on surveyors the importance of deference to the parameters of local assessment. 41 6th Report of the Commissioners of Inland Revenue (Parl. Papers 1862 [3047], xxvii), p. 19: ‘generally persons having other vocations of more interest and importance to themselves than the business of taxes’. 42 T.N.A.: P.R.O., IR 232/1875/6 fo. 96. 43 I.R. and C.E. 2 Evidence, q. 855. 44 5 & 6 Vic., c. 35, ss. 16, 21, 59, 111; Justice of the Peace, xlv (1842), p. 706. 45 5 & 6 Vic., c. 35, s. 113. 46 As H. H. Monroe put it, their powers were ‘the last defence against the taxpayer's power of concealment’ (H. H. Monroe, Intolerable inquisition? Reflections on the Law of Tax (1981), p. 71). 47 Attorney-General v Jay, report of Joseph Timm, 23 Apr. 1861. 48 Attorney-General v Jay, report of Thomas Purdue, 14 Feb. 1860; The Times, 15 Dec. 1859. 49 Robb, p. 8, citing R. Sindall ‘Middle-class crime in 19th century England’ , Criminal Justice Hist. , iv ( 1983 ), 23 – 40 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , at pp. 30–1. 50 Attorney-General v Jay, statement by Kirkham reported 13 Feb. 1860. 51 The Times, 15 Dec. 1859. 52 For a detailed exposition, see R. Colley, ‘“Destroy'd by Time's devouring hand.” Mid-Victorian income tax records: a question of survival’ , Archives , xxv ( 2000 ), 74 – 87 . Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close 53 43 Geo. III, c. 99, s. 67 reposed custody of income tax books and papers in the general commissioners; 5 & 6 Vic., c. 35, s. 59 related to the filing of returns in the offices of the commissioners for only so long as the tax for the year remained unpaid. 54 Hume Committee 1 Evidence, p. 423, correspondence of John Nicholson to Thomas Keogh, 29 March 1852; B. E. V. Sabine, ‘Victorian paper chase’, British Tax Rev. (1969), 10–15, at p. 12; Chester Chronicle, 12 Aug. 1854. 55 See Colley, ‘“Destroy'd by Time's devouring hand”’, p. 79. 56 Hume Committee 1 Evidence, qq. 1414ff. 57 For the wider aspects of ‘old corruption’, see W. D. Rubinstein, ‘The end of “old corruption” in Britain, 1780–1860’, in W. D. Rubinstein, Elites and the Wealthy in Modern British History (1987), pp. 265–303; Monmouthshire Merlin, 10 Jan. 1857. 58 See also I.R. and C.E. 2 Evidence, para. 31: ‘it does not … seem that the duties performed by these officials are of a very onerous or difficult nature.’ 59 Clerks were remunerated by poundage of 2d in the pound on the amount of tax assessed, so that where assessments were discharged on claims for exemption, the clerks still received poundage even though no tax was collected. 60 The Times, 11 Sept. 1855, p. 10d; Chester Chronicle, 2 Aug. 1856, p. 6e. 61 The Times, 25 July 1856, p. 9c; Sale of Waste Paper, pp. 1–2, correspondence of Thomas Keogh to commissioners of income tax for the City of London, 13 Feb. 1858. 62 The Times, 11 Sept. 1855, p. 10d; I.R. and C.E. 1 Evidence, qq. 2409, 2411; Sale of Waste Paper, pp. 1–2, correspondence of Thomas Keogh to commissioners of income tax for the City of London, 13 Feb. 1858; Edward Welsh (1807–74) was appointed surveyor of taxes, Blackheath, Kent, 1827–1841, City of London, 1841–1870 (Account of all Allowances and Compensations granted as Retired Allowances or Superannuations in all Public Offices or Departments (hereafter Superannuations) (Parl. Papers 1875 (130), xlii), p. 23; Report from the Select Committee on Income Tax and Property Tax together with the Proceedings of the Committee, Minutes of Evidence and Appendix (hereafter Hubbard Committee Evidence) (Parl. Papers 1861 (503), vii), q. 2132; I.R. and C.E. 1 Evidence, qq. 2458–9; Superannuations 1869 (Parl. Papers 1870 (156), xli), p. 27). 63 A Return of the Amounts Paid to Persons who received Poundage by way of Remuneration for their Services under the Income Tax in England (hereafter Clerks' Salaries) (Parl. Papers 1854–5 (494), xxx), p. 1. 64 Attorney-General v Jay, report of Joseph Timm, 23 Apr. 1861. 65 The Times, 22 Nov. 1886. 66 Chester Chronicle, 18 Feb. 1854. 67 The Times, 22 Nov. 1886. 68 I.R. and C.E. 1 Evidence, q. 2443. 69 Return for the Year Ending 31 December 1870 of Coroners in England and Wales (Parl. Papers 1872 (420), l), p. 5. 70 John Humphreys (1814–86) was senior coroner for Middlesex and was knighted at Osborne on 23 Aug. 1881 (F. Boase, Modern English Biography (Truro, 1892–1921)). 71 I.R. and C.E. 1 Evidence, qq. 2393–409; I.R. and C.E. 2 Evidence, q. 812. Clerk to the land and assessed tax commissioners for 50 years, Till became clerk to the general commissioners in 1847 (Hubbard Committee Evidence, q. 2054; Sale of Waste Paper, p. 6, correspondence of Till to income tax commissioners for the City of London). 72 The Times, 11 Sept. 1855, p. 10d. 73 The Times, 25 July 1856, p. 9c. 74 Calculated from Attorney-General v Jay, report of Thomas Purdue, 14 Feb. 1860; Clerks' Salaries, p. 1. 75 The Times, 31 Jan. 1843. 76 W. Astle, The History of Stockport (1922; repr. 1971), p. 55, cited in S. Matthews, ‘A Chester scandal of 1854: a study in administrative failure’, British Tax Rev. (2000), 154–68, at p. 156; I.R. and C.E. 2 Evidence, p. 32. 77 Sale of Waste Paper, p. 11; Assessors and Collectors 1858, 1859 and 1860 (Parl. Papers, 1861 (510), xxxiv), pp. 6–7, Tower Hamlets. 78 I.R. and C.E. 1 Evidence, q. 2414; Sale of Waste Paper, pp. 1ff, correspondence of Welsh to Keogh, 11 Feb. 1858; The Times, 12 Feb. 1858, p. 11; Sabine, ‘Victorian paper chase’, pp. 10–15. 79 I.R. and C.E. 2 Evidence, q. 812. 80 Liverpool Mercury, 12 May 1848. 81 The Times, 26 Jan. 1852; Chester Chronicle, 7 Feb. 1852. 82 I.R. and C.E. 1 Evidence, q. 2476. 83 Observations on Circular Letter, pp. 1–8. 84 The Board was one of the earliest departments to select by competitive examination, although nomination was still through the channels of patronage. E.g., William Columban M'Kenna, who was appointed in 1845 (A Return of all New Places Created and Appointments Made … since 1 September 1841 (hereafter New Appointments) (Parl. Papers 1845 (595), xxviii) (re. stamps and taxes at p. 13), pp. 14–15) and received his first surveyorship in King's Lynn, had been sent to England to seek his fortune by Daniel O'Connell, who had patronage of various kinds and secured this position for him (S. McKenna, Reginald McKenna, 1863–1943: a Memoir (1948), p. 28). 85 5 & 6 Vic., c. 35, s. 174. 86 A Return Stating the Names of the Parishes or Places in which a Re-Assessment has been made under the Income Tax Act since the Imposition of Tax in 1842, by reason of the Default of the Collectors (Parl. Papers 1857–8 (281) xxxiv), p. 1. 87 Observations on Circular Letter, p. 1. 88 For the treatment of under- and non-assessment and its remedies at this time, see R. Colley, ‘The Arabian bird: a study of income tax evasion in mid-Victorian Britain’, British Tax Rev. (2001), 207–21. 89 43 Geo. III, c. 99, s. 51. 90 D. J. Newman, ‘White-collar crime: an overview and analysis’, in Geis and Meier pp. 53, 54. 91 Hume Committee 1 Evidence, q. 2620. A defalcation in the City of London totalling £1,457 was paid off by seizure and sale of the collector's goods which produced £461; by his own pension of £35 14s 9d a year; and by his surety (one of the queen's gentleman pensioners) at £60 a year over a 10-year period. 92 Attorney-General v Jay, opinion of Joseph Timm, 20 Dec. 1859. 93 W. L. Burn, Age of Equipoise: a Study of the Mid-Victorian Generation (1964), p. 224 cites O. MacDonagh, ‘The 19th century revolution in government: a reappraisal’ , Hist. Jour. , i ( 1958 ), 52 – 67 Google Scholar OpenURL Placeholder Text WorldCat Close , writing of the special officers appointed to execute summary processes: ‘The power of these officers scarcely admitted of and rarely received precise definition; they used a mixture of legal, moral and social authority, bluffed, bullied and cajoled.’ 94 Attorney-General v Jay, opinion of Joseph Timm, 19 Apr. 1861: Timm is doubtful about 10 counts as they related to only 5 persons. 95 Attorney-General v Jay, report by Timm on letter of 19 Feb. 1861 from Messrs. Digby & Sharpe, solicitors, 1 March 1861. 96 In 1853 Gladstone set the tax into a schematic framework for a 7-year period, the tax gradually reducing (although this was unrealized because of the Crimean War) until its proposed (but again unrealized) extinction in 1860. 97 The Times, 11 Sept. 1855, p. 10d. 98 Throughout the period 1842–80 newspaper reports reveal regular instances of increased indiscriminate assessments (see Colley, ‘The Arabian bird’). 99 Observations on Circular Letter, p. 1. 100 B. E. V. Sabine, A History of Income Tax (1966), p. 119. 101 Charles Senior (c.1815–1877), biographical details derived from New Appointments, pp. 14–15; Hume Committee 2 Evidence, p. 408; T.N.A.: P.R.O., IR 40/799, Attorney-General vPerry (1859); Alumni Cantabrigienses, comp. J. and J. A. Venn (10 vols., Cambridge, 1922–54), pt. 2, v. 464, re. the Revd. C. J. Senior (1863); T.N.A.: P.R.O., IR 40/904 (1860). 102 T.N.A.: P.R.O., IR 40/904, report from Senior, 19 Apr. 1860. 103 C. Senior, Hand-Book of Income Tax Law and Practice (1863). 104 10th Rept. of the Commissioners of H.M. Inland Revenue on the Inland Revenue (hereafter 10 C.I.R.) (Parl. Papers 1866 [3724], xxvi), pp. 41–2. 105 He did not receive the promotion normally granted to officials of the same seniority. He was pensioned off in a reduction in establishments in 1870 after 42 years' service (Superannuations 1869, p. 27). 106 10th C.I.R., pp. 41–2. 107 Hubbard Committee Evidence, q. 2676. 108 There are interesting parallels with J. Bentham, Constitutional Code (1815), and in The Works of Jeremy Bentham, ed. J. Bowring (11 vols., Edinburgh, 1843), ix, ch. xi, recalled by Jennings p. 298, at which time abstract fictitious entities were not yet employed for the designation of persons, and classes of persons (e.g., the Law instead of lawyers, the Court instead of judges). © The Author(s) 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model) © The Author(s) 2005. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of Institute of Historical Research. All rights reserved. For permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oup.com
TI - The Shoreditch tax frauds: a study of the relationship between the state and civil society in 1860
JF - Historical Research
DO - 10.1111/j.1468-2281.2005.00231.x
DA - 2005-11-01
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-shoreditch-tax-frauds-a-study-of-the-relationship-between-the-5yoB70Bpi1
SP - 540
EP - 562
VL - 78
IS - 202
DP - DeepDyve
ER -