I HAVE never done any tax planning. I just fill in the forms and pay what’s due. Sometimes I’m a bit late but that’s laziness; otherwise I just comply.

I have no doubt that I would pay less tax if I put my mind to it and structured my affairs so that my trustees in Ireland, under the control of my deceased aunt, owned all my assets and sent me a paltry taxable allowance for cleaning the pool in the mansion, which the trust, not me, owns. Truth is, I can’t be bothered and nor can my dead aunt. I only have one personal bank account and my economic life is an open book. I sleep well at night, but I’m not convinced my approach is right.

Tax planning on a global scale is centre stage, with Apple being the subject of a US Senate hearing into its tax affairs. I watched some of it on TV. There was a curious mixture of the senators trying to grill Tim Cook, the Apple CEO, while sucking up to this iconic business leader. Cook was accorded rock-star status in the inquiry. They couldn’t help themselves.

“I love Apple,” exclaimed one senator. “My granddaughter has an iPhone 5,” another proudly announced. Cook was impressive, straightforward, honest and to the point. He told the gathered hearing that Apple had paid every dollar due in US taxes. He felt it would be unfair to do otherwise and proclaimed himself to be a fair man.

The “economics of aggregation” — another new phrase — says that a manufacturing company does best if it situates itself among its lowest-cost factors of production. We all know this — which is why there are factories in China, call centres in India and the remnants of our own decentralisation policies in the Eastern Cape and elsewhere. Under this imperative you find yourself (at a global level) in different countries, which introduces the opportunity of tax jurisdiction arbitrage.

Countries, of course, introduce tax incentives to attract investment and provide employment for their own people. I find this perfectly obvious and acceptable.

So, why is Apple in the dock?

There are a bunch of reasons — one is that it recently only paid 2% tax on revenue of $74bn generated through its structure in Ireland. The Irish are happy, the Americans furious. Second, Apple recently raised $17bn (through the issue of varied-term capital notes) to part-fund an investor payback in the US, rather than repatriate some of its vast cash holdings offshore, on which it would have had to pay tax. Well, what would you do? Every chief financial officer is practically mandated to avoid paying tax unnecessarily. Avoidance is within the law and acceptable, unlike its ugly cousin, evasion, which is not.

Jurisdictional arbitrage is not new. People, never mind companies, go to great lengths to do it — moving their place of residence (or moving around so often that it’s practically impossible to determine where to tax them before they’re off somewhere else) to avoid the taxes they should pay where they really live and work. If you found yourself in the middle of the ocean, say, outside the territorial waters of any country, then you could presumably operate financially from there without any tax bothers at all. The only problem would be where to hide your tax-free cash? No problem, in a Swiss bank account. When I was growing up there was no greater status symbol than claiming to have a Swiss bank account — symbol of wealth and mystery beyond mere mortals.

Switzerland, the ultimate haven for secret cash gains (ill-gotten or otherwise) announced recently that it would succumb to international pressure (from the US in particular) and relax some of its rules of information access to assist in investigations of tax evasion. There must have been huge pressure and no doubt some special deal was brokered. This is a breakthrough into an age-old hiding place. Switzerland harbours about $2-trillion of people’s “private” money, but they are not alone, with the Channel Islands and Dublin, the Caribbean and Panama and Hong Kong and Singapore at about $1-trillion apiece. I’ve heard the new place to have your money is Malta — of course, you’ve got to have enough of the stuff to have to worry about where you store it.

It’s all very complicated and, I imagine, impossible to regulate across sovereign boundaries — not without some form of fiscal union globally, and that’s impossible, even in already monetarily unified Europe. I’m not surprised. Separate policy motivated by different self-interest is difficult to integrate. So it won’t happen.

Perhaps the only way would be to get acceptance for catch-all global definitions and tax rates to apply to revenue of whatever source. And the tax has to be applied to the revenue line — there are too many tricks between revenue and profit.

This “tax net” system can be brought all the way down from the global debate to our very own company tax rules. I just don’t get that we can’t have group tax, for instance. If you lose money in one part of the same group (defined for the purpose of this argument as a set of companies with one ultimate holding company, one set of final shareholders) then surely you should be able to offset this loss against profits elsewhere in the group. The focus should be the net economic effect on the taxpayer, rather than the constituent parts. The separate entity tax legislation opens the door for more tax planning and less funds to the fiscus than it would cost if the revenue service allowed intra-group offset.

Finally, we get to where it really matters, the individual.

We all have our bugbears. I object to progressive tax. I object to paying tax on the returns on investments made out of already taxed income. In is simplest form, why should you pay tax on your savings made out of your take-home pay which has already been taxed? Ridiculous! To complete my short list of three, why should I pay tax towards things I don’t use or expenditure I don’t approve of? I also have a list of things I think should be tax deductible, like health and education and (some) housing … but we’ve all got lists.

These are some of the things that I would like to see.

Tax companies (any form of business) on the revenue line, not the profit line. Implement industry-specific taxes so that industry players pay for their own problems.

Abolish personal tax. Introduce a higher, variable, value added tax with appropriate exemptions and differential rates to account for the economic divides among our people (maize zero-rated, jewellery at 25%, say). The aggregate base rate of VAT payable will be determined annually in advance with a view to balancing last year’s actual income and expenditure and funding this year’s budget. I’m not convinced the rate will go up, because a fortune will be saved in administration of personal tax and all the “tax planners” will be caught in the net.

I don’t think it’s illegal or immoral for Apple to plan its tax affairs to minimise actual tax paid, within the law. I think it’s the laws that allow vast sums of money to escape the net that are stupid.

I’M NOT sure it will be quite on the same scale as remembering where you were when John F Kennedy was shot or the first aircraft was crashed into the World Trade Center on 9/11, but you will for sure remember when the exchange rate crossed the R10/$ barrier, again, as it did last Thursday.

I was sitting in a board meeting, watching the live Bloomberg feed on my mobile. My announcement of the R10/$ crossing was met with resigned acceptance and disappointment by all of those gathered.

There isn’t much difference between R9.98/$ and R10.02/$, but there is, somehow. Ten crosses the line — not quite the Rubicon, not quite into the definition of banana republic, but it does cross the line.

Our rand has depreciated about 25% over the past year — that’s a lot, that’s beyond only economic explanation. I have been a protagonist of a weaker exchange rate for some time, but I certainly didn’t hope to get here the way we did.

There is a huge difference between determining or influencing the exchange rate through purposeful monetary policy (such as lowering interest rates) and having your exchange rate change through external investment flows. One is done by us, the other by them!

When the Bank of Japan lowers interest rates to promote an export-driven economic recovery, that’s one thing — when a lack of investor confidence drives down a currency’s value, that’s quite another.

Our problems are not new, they just seem more acute and worsening — and we’re not handling them at all well. We have quite the opposite of the “strong and growing” mining sector that President Jacob Zuma aspires to. Whether we like it or not, we’re still perceived as a mining economy and our cost structure, labour unrest and the effect of the global slowdown on the economics of commodities are all compounding (not conspiring) against us.

Some of those things we can do something about. We’d better get started, before we have the worst of all worlds — high local interest rates and imported inflation.

No more speeches. Gather the ministers of mineral resources, finance and labour. Gather the unions. Gather the mining house CEOs. Make a plan. We are at risk.