Snails as a Tax Dodge?

Could Slugs do it too..??

Snail surrounded by money and smoking a cigar

Are snails a secret Tax Avoidance measure?

There have been two stories in the news which might support this theory.

BBC news in Cumbria, North West England, reported that a rural Post Box in Adderstone had to be taken out of service recently. Every night, all the snails in the area would converge on it, slime their way up the pole and get into the box itself.

Once inside, they’d feast on all the letters locals had stamped and posted. Of course, along with letters to Aunty Margaret and greetings cards to friends and relatives, this includes letters to and from His Majesty’s Revenue and Customs – the ‘Tax Man’. The rumour was that Tax correspondence was the favoured gustatory choice. Perhaps the brown envelopes used by the government offer superior taste?

It’s unclear how this phenomenon came to light. Perhaps the ‘Postie’ who pulled up in his van to collect the mail noticed that all the letters were shredded and covered with snail trails. Or the workers in the sorting office found it challenging to decipher the destination addresses of half-eaten envelopes collected from this particular box. Snails and their close relatives, slugs, can digest cellulose for energy. Calcium in the paper is useful for snail shells. Indeed, letters might even be a near-perfect food supply for the little b@$t@rds. If you don’t receive your tax demand, it isn’t due – right..?!

The second story, also broken by the BBC, concerns senior staff in Liverpool Town Hall. They suspect a business set up in a city centre office block is using snail farming as a tactic to avoid paying expensive business taxes. By claiming his business is agricultural, the businessman hopes his company will be exempt under current legislation. But he has a couple of problems. There’s the obvious one: err… this is an office block. Not a shed in a field. And the second has to do with his lack of knowledge about snails. There are fifteen crates in the office, each with only two animals. He has discovered that the number of snails per crate must be kept to a minimum to avoid "cannibalism, group sex and snail orgies".

The article claims that snails can be sold in 1Kg bags – about two hundred of the blighters – for around £14.

A viable business model would therefore demand many thousands of snails to be fed and looked after.

Not fifteen crates containing a maximum of thirty as the entire stock of the business!

The reporter breaking this story has dug into the company director’s other activities. He is also director of another company whose website boasts it “has a proven track record of minimising the liability for empty property rates" and describes the company as the "Canceller of the Exchequer"

My question is more basic, though. Who would want to actually pay money for a bag of two hundred snails?! Let me know in the comments…

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