It’s 1934. First-class postage costs 3 cents, so she’s buying 200 stamps. Six dollars is a substantial sum, roughly $100 in today’s currency. Later that afternoon, at home, she opens the firebox door of her furnace and consigns the stamps to the flames. Finally, her conscience is clear.
For years, she’d enjoyed cross-border shopping and had developed a knack for bringing her purchases home on her own “duty-free” plan.
But recently, Bishop Renison’s sermon had made her realize that when she dodged customs duties, she was stealing, and that it was just as bad to steal from the government as from another human being. In fact, she thought, she was actually stealing from other Canadians, not the government, because when some people don’t pay their taxes — and customs duties are taxes — other people have to pay more. In 1934, lots of people who used to be comfortable are feeling the pinch. Unlike them, she’s able to pay, so maybe she should.
But she is a bit scared of the customs officials. The big customs desk in the grand hall of Union Station is intimidating. Also, she fears she might end up paying a big penalty or being charged a lot of interest if she confesses. Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, she worries about what to do. Then she figures it out. To put the money she owes into the government’s coffers, all she has to do is to buy postage stamps. By paying for the stamps, she’ll be settling her account with the state. And she’ll remain anonymous. But if she uses the stamps to mail letters, then she’ll still be cheating. So — burn the stamps.
This buying-and-burning exercise was one unusually inventive way of paying what the press used to call “conscience money” — money paid to make up for past sins, such as tax evasion or, say, bogus expense claims.
Most people weren’t as creative as the stamp lady in the way they paid up. And some people did it on a much larger scale. During the 1930s, the largest payment of conscience money to the Ottawa tax office was a bank draft for $5,400 (that’s about $90,000 — a sum that’s oddly familiar in late May 2013). Mostly, the money came into tax offices, local or national, as cash in an envelope, in smaller amounts: 50 cents, $1, $10.
When it was an income tax dodger who wanted to come clean, the figures were more precise, and usually larger. In 1932, A.N.O. Nymous sent in a postal money order for $306.73 (just under $5,000 today). Mr. Nymous (perhaps Ms. Nymous?) said the amount was not only the income tax owed, but also the interest that would have been charged. He was clearing a particular debt, and clearing his conscience.
And these payments were truly, at least mostly, about conscience. The tax delinquents had gotten away with it, and they weren’t about to tell the taxman who they were. (There was still the small matter of the penalties they’d have owed.)
When the British Treasury reported a $50,000 payment of conscience money in 1936 ($840, 410 in 2013!), one Toronto Star wag remarked, “And yet people think that anyone whose taxes run to $50,000 can’t have had a conscience.” The smaller the sum, it did seem, the more compelling the guilt feelings.
Occasionally, conscience money payments came with a note that said religion had inspired the writer to do the right thing. Perhaps the payer had confessed to their priest. From Quebec, it was often a priest who sent in money on behalf of a penitent parishioner. Also, in the early 1930s, a middle-class Christian revival movement, the Oxford Group, convinced many English-speaking Canadians to take a good hard look at their morals. The result? A record high in conscience money payments in 1932, according to the National Revenue Review, with a nod to the Oxford Groupers.
There was enough conscience money flowing into government offices that there existed an accounting protocol to handle it. The cash was not to wander into a clerk’s pocket — all of it had to be receipted. If the sender supplied no address, and most did not, then a letter went out to the editor of the newspaper nearest to the place on the postmark, asking the paper to publish a short acknowledgement of receipt. Every year until 1953 the year’s total take of “conscience money” was listed in the year-end accounts of the departments of Finance and National Revenue.
Even so, there wasn’t enough guilt going around, or enough conscience money coming in, to solve the budget woes of the poor sod who was Canada’s finance minister during most of the Depression, Edgar Rhodes.
Rhodes was comforted, though, when in 1933, a Liberal senator, former journalist and longtime MP, G.P. Graham, sent the receiver general an extra $10,000 ($605.50 back then) that had come Graham’s way as an unexpected windfall in the bond market. Graham wanted Rhodes to know, though, that he wasn’t feeling guilty about anything. He was “a little fussed up,” in fact, that the Conservative Globe had printed a note about his donation under the heading “Conscience.” Rhodes just wished there were more like Graham, as might we all.
Maybe conscience money still comes in. “Donations to the Crown” is a catch-all category in the public accounts that might include it. Perhaps, even now, some people realize they’ve been just a bit too sharp in their “aggressive tax planning” and they’d feel better if they paid what they owe, even if they aren’t looking into the teeth of, say, a Senate inquiry.
But for that to be so, we’d have to believe that, if we stuff that envelope with cash or buy a money order and send it into the finance minister, it will be recorded as “conscience money” and put toward the general expenses of government for the general good. And maybe that’s hard to believe. You never see those little acknowledgments of “conscience money received” in the newspaper any more. Maybe we could start that up again.
Original Article
Source: thestar.com
Author: Shirley Tillotson
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