Every year you go to your accountant and you ask him the same question: can I pay less taxes? The accountant gets out his calculator, punches the keys with his fingertips, applying a lot of pressure on each digit, and then sighs, shakes his head mournfully and says: “Not really, no.” And it ends there.

Sometimes you even get accountants or auditors who give you a complex explanation on how you cannot bend the rules, how you must always pay every single cent and how it is a duty of every citizen to contribute to the communal kitty of the country. Fair enough, you’re a law-abiding citizen, so you just pay.

But then, what happens if all of a sudden you find out that this auditor himself has stacks of money obtained in an illicit manner, and is a black belt at exploring and applying all avenues to avoid taxes. You’d be absolutely aghast. And you’d want to report him to the police. But there’s a snag. When you go to the police, you’re told: “Sorry tonight there’s rabbit on the canteen menu and the Commissioner couldn’t miss a taster.”

Then I’ll come again tomorrow, you say. But you’re told: “Hmm no, there’s Inter playing tomorrow, he can’t miss that.” I’ll come again the next day then, you say, but again you get: “Oh no, he’ll be in a bad mood because Juventus will be playing and he hates them.”

What do you do then? You sit down, with your head in your hands and you say, fine, I’ll report the case to the Office of the Prime Minister. However, the minute you say that, you realise that the said auditor has his office in the very same building as the Prime Minister’s and that he is also best friends forever with the Prime Minister’s chief of staff, his most trusted man, who also happens to be piling up sack loads of dubious money.

We all have one tiny match, together we can make an explosion

So what do you do then? You sit with your head in your hands again. Well, you think, if the Prime Minister himself couldn’t care less, then why on earth am I paying taxes myself? Why on earth do I have to pay a fee for submitting VAT receipts late, you think. Why do I have to contribute to the national piggy bank when the very people at the top are not and, worse still, are involved in shady deals?

And so it is that, safe in the knowledge that you can never be arraigned in court, you stop following the rule of law. What can happen, you think? The commissioner can hardly lift a finger when he’s just thinking of food or foot, can he?

But then you reflect a bit more and you realise that that would be the direct road to Gotham City, where being a thief is glorified. You think of all the hundreds of thousands of euros being stolen from the people and you think of all the things that could be done with that money: cancer medicines, mental hospitals, social workers, hospital equipment, sports facilities, drug rehab treatment… all the things we are in dire need of, all the human stories that could take a positive twist if things were in order.

And then you know that there is another option. Rather than going down the Gotham city route, you can do one little thing.

You can fight it.

▪ As I type this I am humming my favourite song, The Fight Song by Rachel Platten. The lyrics go something like this

Like how a single word/Can make a heart open/I might only have one match/But I can make an explosion/And all those things I didn’t say/Wrecking balls inside my brain/I will scream them loud tonight/Can you hear my voice this time?/This is my fight song

My power’s turned on/Starting right now I’ll be strong/I’ll play my fight song/And I don’t really care if nobody else believes/’Cause I’ve still got a lot of fight left in me.

We all have one tiny match, together we can make an explosion.

krischetcuti@gmail.com
Twitter: @krischetcuti