WHEN THERE ARE TAXES TO PAY, THE CATS WON’T PLAY
Why Cat Owners in Siberia Really Need to Pay Their Taxes
“[I]n this world,” as the famous quote attributed to Benjamin Franklin goes, “nothing can be said to be certain, except death and taxes.” And it’s pretty much true: If you don’t pay your taxes, the government will find a way to get the money you owe. In the United States, the penalties involved in this are typically a mix of more money owed (in the form of fines and interest) and, in egregious cases, prison time. And while the Internal Revenue Service (IRS) can get a lien on your home, it’s rare that they’ll foreclose. Instead, they often simply wait to collect the owed tax dollars until you sell your house or refinance your mortgage.
But what if you don’t have anything of value? There are other tools available to the government, such as wage garnishment (when your employer diverts some percentage of your salary to the taxing authority per a court order). This way, the government gets what it is owed, and there’s no opportunity for you to spend the money on something else before that happens.
While most countries have similar objectives when it comes to taxes, not all of them take the same approach when collecting these unpaid dues. In Russia, for example, many local governments will seize everyday items of value to make up for taxes owed by nonpayers (and just about anything you own is fair game). These items are held until the delinquent citizen pays off his or her tax bill.
That’s exactly what happened in the Siberian city of Novosibirsk in December 2014. According to the BBC, a student in Novosibirsk owed about 12,000 rubles—about $200 US dollars—in taxes, but was unwilling or unable to pony up the cash. Bailiffs were dispatched to his residence to confiscate something of roughly the same value, to be held until the student could pay his societal debt. When the bailiffs arrived, however, they found nothing of similar value among the student’s material possessions. That is until they expanded their search to include other items. Specifically, the bailiffs took notice of the student’s cat, which was a British Shorthair. They realized it was a pedigreed cat and, therefore, was also expensive. The bailiffs seized the cat, holding it until the student could come up with the 12,000 rubles owed.
Apparently, pet-related tax seizure isn’t an isolated incident in Siberia, either. At around the same time, bailiffs in another Russian town called Minusinsk seized the pets of a second tax delinquent. In this case (per Russian news agency Interfax) the pets held were a cat and a rabbit. Earlier that year, in the Siberian town of Tomsk, a businesswoman who owed 20,000 rubles found her four cats seized for nonpayment. Fortunately, despite being held for crimes they didn’t commit, the pets were returned once their owners had paid the back taxes.