Restrictions upon the Right of Election
10.27. During the decades over which a marriage will normally last, the absolute and relative incomes of husband and
wife will usually change. There will be years in which to be taxed as a unit would be more advantageous financially,
others when separate individual taxation would reduce their tax liability. To provide married couples with an
unrestricted right to move in and out of family unit taxation whenever it would save them money to do so would be
perilous to the Revenue and inequitable between married persons and single, whether they be bachelors, spinsters,
widowers or widows. The proposal to institute an option for taxation as a family unit is not put forward as a mode of
reducing taxes for married persons (or raising them for the
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single); it is, rather, designed to provide a
fairer allocation of personal income tax between persons, and in particular between families with different practices
and attitudes towards the expenditure of their separate incomes. Some restriction on the right to elect and to cancel
past election therefore seems to be imperative.
10.28. Such a restriction would not be easy to define and administer. Provisions for cancelling an election would of course be necessary in the event of formal separation or divorce. In addition it might be provided that married persons who do not elect for family unit treatment within some defined period after the option becomes available or after their marriage may elect thereafter only upon the fulfilment of a condition that guards the revenue from any misuse of the option to elect. Thus the condition might require the payment of the additional tax that the spouses would have paid had they elected in the immediately preceding years.