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Comment by dhughes | Hacker News Reader

To give you an idea of how federal tax workers act here is an example.

In my region is a big tax centre and it was discovered these people who process taxes, federal workers, smoke illegal smuggled cigarettes. Someone searched through the old cigarette buts around the smoking area of the building and found a lot were off-tax, Native, illegal cigarettes.

These people make $60,000 to $80,000 per year in an area where a good wage is a full-time minimum wage job.

Combined with the low cost of living here and a massive wage these people these federal tax workers are beyond arrogant.

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That is an outstandingly mild offense and does not broach anywhere near the borderlines of "arrogance".

It's classic arrogance, CCRA employees act like anyone who doesn't pay every last stupid tax is a criminal, then they flagrantly violate the law.

How do they acquire the tax free cigarettes? Is it against the law for them to buy them?

Tax-free cigarettes are available for sale in "smoke shacks" in native territories. By law, they can be sold tax-free only to Status Indians, but illegal sales to those that do not have the status are rampant. So essentially it is a contraband, only within a country.

When I was a kid in small-town Ontario, buying tax-free cigarettes was a lot like buying marijuana - you went to the guy who was known to sell them, who was usually hanging around the high school, and he hooked you up.

In my day the cigarettes were name brands, sold to low-tax American states and then smuggled back into Canada through Indian reservations - you couldn't tell you were smoking smuggled cigarettes by looking at the butts. Now Indian reservations manufacture their own untaxed cigarettes - which is completely legal, when bought and smoked on the reservation. However, they're also illegally sold off the reservation.

In Ontario at least, it's against the law to buy these cigarettes off the reservation. The penalty is a fine. Enforcement, for the individual buyers, is pretty much non-existent.

It's even easier than that. I know of local stores in my area (heart of the GTA) that sell them over-the-counter. You just have to know how to ask.

Makes sense, I'm from Ontario too and I knew kids in school who got cigs (under 18) but since I didn't smoke I never tracked down how to do it.

Interestingly, some provinces place weekly or monthly limits on the purchase of tax-exempt smokes in order to combat this. However, their method of synchronizing the limits with retailers is laughably outdated and insecure (one province transmits drivers' license numbers and home addresses in plaintext using plain FTP or dial-up). Because of this, some retailers are able to forge the necessary ID to obtain limitless tax-exempt cigarettes which are then sold to non-Indians.

Source: I worked as a network technician for several retailers across Canada who were later penalized for fraud of this sort. Yikes.

Yes very much against the law.

The cigarettes would have to have been smuggled into the province and being a tax department worker for the federal government it makes it far worse.

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