Football, cheating, tax and the community spirit

Will Hutton has a good article in The Observer:

"Governments find it hard to challenge the accounting industry, along with much of the financial services' so-called structured (cheating) investment operations, built around advising the rich how to avoid (and even evade) tax.

Too many people have been allowed for too long to build a career on advising others how to cheat. The lack of vengeance is an explicit signal to everybody else. Meeting one's obligations under the rules is for somebody else – the little people. Almost nobody gets found out and when they do the penalties are trivial. Join the crowd and cheat. Dive in the box. Don't pay tax. Have your racing driver crash. Try to rig the market or bend the rules to win the game."

The full article is worth reading. It's bang on the nail.