Tax Vobiscum

The six Common Market countries have had no end of trouble reaching tariff agreements on such disparate items as German beer, French mayonnaise, and Italian spaghetti. Now a totally unexpected commodity is at issue. In Strasbourg last week, the fledgling European Parliament formally agreed to consider a question raised by a Belgian Socialist Deputy named Ernest Glinne. The Market, Glinne demands, should spell out once and for all "where we stand when the remains of cremated human beings are transported from one member state to another."

Glinne's ire is focused on the case of tiny, traditionally Catholic Luxembourg. Because of historic church opposition to cremation, Luxembourg has no crematoriums of its own. Until mid-1968, when the Six abolished international customs and substituted a complex system of "taxes on value added" (T.V.A.), this was no great problem; when a Luxembourgeois who believed in cremation died, his family would simply have him taken across the French border to Strasbourg. But under T.V.A., French tax collectors consider cremation a taxable "service rendered to a private person." As a result, they now dun bereaved Luxembourgeois for 17% of the Strasbourg crematorium's fee--the "value added" to the deceased. On their way home with the ashes, the mourners get hit again, this time by Luxembourg officials who demand payment of another 8% tax for "work entrusted to a foreign company, with reimportation of the finished product."

In raising the cremation issue, Protester Glinne is trying to get action on the egregious tax inequities that exist among the Six. But so far, the main effect of his campaign has been to stir new doubts about Common Market membership in Britain, where cremation is common. Britons already consider themselves too heavily taxed on their income to be expected to cough up for what they urn as well.

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