I can’t help thinking sometimes what it’ll be like in space. We’re obviously going there…you can tell from all the sci-fi movies that are set a few years into the future. Like in The Mauritian, even though their mission to Mars went completely wrong and one guy ended up stranded in Mauritius. And there was that other one, Intergalactic, with the guy going through a wormhole and ending up in another galaxy where some evil empire is building a superweapon that’ll blow up planets, and he joins the crew of a frontier exploration spaceship to stop them.
And what about taxes? Right now we have things like Inland Revenue who deal with Earth-bound tax. Like, business tax returns in Melbourne are dealt with by a governing body, and that’s just one city. When mankind colonizes Mars, or Zaxxon Prime, who deals with tax returns? We’ll have to have some kind of ‘Outland’ Revenue, an office based on this planet that handles all the tax needs and their unique specifications, being way out in space. If someone goes to the Mars Juice Bar (name pending) and it’s on work time and they take a friend, can they save their receipt and submit it to Outland Revenue? Because the way taxes are done on Earth is stressful enough without faxes being sent from another planet, full of receipts from another world. Heck, people can barely keep up now. That’s why we have specialised professions who deal with BAS tax returns and IAS tax returns. See how complicated we’ve made things for ourselves? Chuck in another planet and the whole economy looks set to collapse.
So this needs some kind of preparation. After all, the Mars Colony isn’t going to be some kind of frontier wilderness! Like Melbourne if business accounting was suddenly taken away, they would be little more than animals. Professionals need to be in place, plans must be made.
-Soren