Anyway, these days, the collectors have turned their attention to serve the tax office. Years ago, I knew the manager of a marina who would point out certain members of the public and say, ‘That man is a tax inspector’. He was able to spot the snoopers who came to his marina in order to take notes about the yachts. The tax office would then try to match the yacht-owners with their income tax returns, and work out who might be cheating on their tax payments. Anyone who had told the tax department that they had a bad year, would have a lot of explaining to do about how they came to afford a million-dollar vessel.

These days, small-business owners who deal in cash, and who cheat the system, are committing more than one offence. Naturally, not paying income tax is one criminal activity. The other is collecting GST/VAT from consumers and not passing it on. This means that a cash-based business is making an extraordinary profit. To combat the cash cheats, the tax department might be sending garbage collectors to collect all the clues about the activities of a small business.

Here’s how it works. Let’s say that you own a fast-food franchise, and it is your practice to always wear plastic gloves when preparing an order. The tax ‘rubbish’ collector would count how many boxes you discard during a three-month period. If you later say that you only sold 1000 sandwiches, yet you had discarded 20 empty glove boxes, you would have some explaining to do. Many small business operators do not realise that they leave behind many clues, despite trying very hard to cover their tracks. For example, some purchase their stock via the back door, using cash. You would be stunned if you really knew how much stock, delivered by the company representative, is really stuff that fell off the back of a truck. The manufacturer’s warehouse manager would be in cahoots with the delivery-truck driver, who stacks his truck with stolen goods, and sells them to convenience stores under the counter. I knew a wine company whose premium brand of wine was syphoned from the vineyard in large vats, and sold on the black market after being bottled by the thieves (being regular employees). Bottles are easy to buy or steal, and labels are easily stolen or printed. The extent to which this goes on is alarming. If the convenience store ever has to pay a legitimate invoice, such payments are mostly made via a second company that inflates its expenses via clever merchants who write out fake invoices made in the name of Company X which is a sister company of Company Y which is owned by the sister of the brother of the wife of the owner of Company Z which uses the ABN of an old unlisted company. (This is not supposes to happen, but it does. One of my investigations for my client defied all logic and found this type of anomaly, which the authorities denied could happen, but was happening, due to a computer loophole! It is possible to have a listed active ABN for a de-registered company). It’s all a dirty game. Made even dirtier when the employees, left to work on their own for a shift or two, rob the owner blind by stealing goods, giving products away to friends and family, and pocketing the takings without ringing them up on the cash resister.

Below we see a range of photos of the types of clues that tax inspectors can use. They will eventually ask the shop-owner to furnish the invoices for that stock. Unable to present the invoices, the shop-owners has to lie big-time, or blow the whistle on the truck-drivers from whose back things seem to fall off. As a result of this risky behaviour, a lot of delivery trucks are now delivering goods in plain boxes, completely unmarked. And the more serious ones are offering to pick-up the empty boxes, offering to refund deposits for such empty boxes, saying that they care about the environment. What a tangled web we weave.

It’s is always a game of cat and mouse, and for now, the tax inspectors and the tax auditors, are still one step ahead, if they choose to put their claws into you. Mind you, there are so many tax cheats out there, that it is really overwhelming. It gets to the point where the tax commissioner had to decide where to allocate the resources, given that the minister wants a return on investment. So it becomes a question of catching the big fish, the easy targets, and those that would make good media fodder.

The Japanese sushi train washes the lids each night. Taking a photo each day for 90 days will give the tax inspector some ammunition when challenging the restaurant to explain why it cries poor. From these lids, one can see that quite a lot of plates were produced. If the owner is going to say that most of the food was discarded, then the question would be, why make so many dishes each night, when the demand is so low?

If a bottle-shop keeps stocking the fridge each day, one can safely presume that the bottles are selling. If so, where are the invoices for these bottles? Paying cash does not mean that the bottle-shop can hide the takings.

A store with this level of daily stock movement ought to show a healthy set of books. Even if the business can say that it did not make a profit, the GST payments had better add up.

The cash-mad convenience stores will have a lot of explaining to do if they cannot show who supplied these goods, how they paid for them, and when they sold them. Then the flow-on effect will start, whereby the distributor had better show income for these deliveries.

Anyway, I am happy to announce a new discovery: drawers that no longer slam. What a great idea. I happened to be a guest of Jupiters Casino in Townsville, and the general manager was a gracious host who upgraded me to their best room. It was well appointed with all the modern conveniences, including these innovative silent drawers. As the video below will show you, no matter how hard I try to slam them shut, they will not slam. A hydraulic system absorbs the impact by slowing the draw, and then gently closing it. Perfect for hotels and cosy apartments! Especially where banging would disturb other guests.

P.S. There is a debate going on about the designer’s intent. A friend of mine says that these drawers were not so much designed to ‘not bang’, but to close fully at the slightest of suggestions. One simple flick and the draw closes all by itself, all the way, without needing any follow-up. If that be true, then, my goodness, what a load of engineering to cater to the lazy.

I telephoned their head office, but no-one knew about this building. I was uncertain about its location. After a lot of searching, we were unable to work it out. Then a few months later, a Julie contacted me from the franchise office and said that she might have cracked it. It was the address of the old factory, which is no longer in use.

The bakery dates back to 1988 when Noel Carroll and Noel Roberts founded the company. I would guess that this was their idea. And a clever one at that. Imagine how many people get to see that logo on approach to Sydney airport.





Recently, I spotted a roof sporting the Dr Pepper soft drink logo. It was on approach to Sydney airport, if my memory serves me. If you have information about that, I would like to take a look at it using Google Maps. I am not sure in which suburb it would have been.

The implementation of the two-rolls is really about economy, more so than about convenience! Hotel bathrooms, especially at five-star establishments, need to appear un-lived-in. A guest arrives, and they need to feel that no stranger had used the toilet or slept in that bed. The bedroom must give off an air of newness and privacy. Besides, if you think about it for too long, you start to dislike the idea of sleeping in a bed that, only the night before, might have entertained a midnight drunken orgy. The same horrid thoughts at restaurants: that spoon in your mouth was, moments earlier, in some other person’s messy bacteria-ridden cake-hole. As for the bathroom, yuk. So, housekeeping must remove all signs of anyone having been there. For this reason, partially-used toilet rolls are replaced by new ones. And to prove that no-one had used that new roll, the staff are trained to crease the end so that it forms a neat triangle. Some hotels use a round sticker to make it all look up-market (I am waiting for the day when designer rolls arrive, embossed with Gucci or Prada, and scented by the said brand. In the tradition of Chanel Number 5, we might see the Number 2 range of toilet accessories — all environmentally friendly).

By the way, when I worked at Compaq Computer Corporation all those years ago, the question of toilet rolls was the talk of the town. Our landlord was one of the high-society types who appeared in the paper whenever she travelled overseas to purchase a $10,000 dress from the catwalks of Milan and Paris, or when she and her husband took possession of their new Rolls Royce. I had a great relationship with them, and so I learned a lot about their story and their philosophy (they were war migrants who started with nothing). The husband-and-wife team amassed untold wealth, but they were superbly frugal. So much so that the toilets in our building contained used toilet rolls. The landlord had an arrangement with local hotels to purchase from them the half-rolls that they would otherwise have thrown out. This meant that we never, ever, saw a full roll in any of the washrooms. Anyway, I digress.

Back to the five-star hotels. Guests enter a room that affords them a full roll. However, if the guest stays for several days, the rolls dwindle each day. Traditionally, every morning, a new roll would replace the partially-used ones because guests would not appreciate running out. For some strange reason, hotels do not like to leave a stash of spare rolls in the linen cupboard. They provide shoe polish, sewing kits, shoe horns, bathrobes, moisturisers, tooth brushes, and a host of nick-nacks, whisky, beer, but never spare rolls of paper (there are reasons, but I hesitate to digress yet again). It was therefore agreed that, in the interest of saving money, the maintenance engineers would refit the dispensers so that two rolls can be placed side by side. Each guest arrives to two new rolls, and as one is used, it is not replaced until it is completely used up. Now do you see the clever thinking here? By changing the dispensing system, hotels saved a lot of money. Over time, guests became used to seeing one full roll and one diminished roll. So much so that five-star hotels no longer bother with the ‘never used’ policy. It’s now first in, best dressed, and bathrooms now, upon check-in, contain partially used rolls, and people don’t complain much because at worst, they have one-and-a-bit rolls. Who’s going to complain about that? Toilet-talk is embarrassing for most people.

Hence, the stroke of genius. The two-roll system was not implemented as a matter of convenience, but as a matter of economy. This clever practice now extends to automatic telling machines. It was always a bother for banks and machine-owners to change the partially-used rolls. If they did not have a full roll at every opportunity, it meant that the technical/maintenance officers, who drove around to service thousands of ATMs, had to drive around more frequently. That is costly. Equally costly would be any ATM that ran out of paper. Therefore, under these circumstances, it was the policy to change partially-used ATM roll, just to minimise the risks of an imperative machine. As you can see from this photo, ATM rolls have been growing over time. Rolls are now huge. Discarding partially-used ATM rolls meant throwing out good money. For this reason, new ATMs are designed to take two rolls. With this, no roll ever needs to be replaced until it is completely empty. Genius. The travelling technician no longer has to worry about a machine running out.

The next step beyond the two-roll ATMs will be double-sided printing. Some rolls have advertisements printed on the back. In the future, we could see ATM receipts using both sides to reduce the length of paper required. Thereafter, we will see ATMs asking users of they would like their receipt emailed to them or sent to their phone, in an effort to save even more paper. We might soon see the paperless ATM. Mind you, some countries are experimenting with the paperless toilet, using jets of water, but that’s nothing new. It’s funny how old ideas come back to bite us in the bum.