McAllister of SARS: the man deserves a medal

Have you ever noticed how older chartered accountants have long arms and a crooked back? There is a reason.

It started in final year at university when they had to study Silke on South African Income Tax, an enormous volume of work and the cause of multiple injuries and breakages when dropped. The cost was enough to keep students out of pubs for two months.

Article clerks of the '70s and '80s also carried comptometers and the first luggable computers. You had to be fit to be an article clerk back then.

Although Aubrey Silke died many years ago, he remains the patron saint of tax nerds. There have been feuds among his successors as to who would carry on with the good book of tax. So it's nice too see a Silke book is now back in publication. I must say I quite like the new, cheaper, student-guide version.

So what is there to really blow your mind for a tax read, apart from studying the judgments in the SA tax cases - and they haven't broken enough new ground to keep the mind alive.

In fact, there is a lot to choose from. And if one adds the considerable number of corporate publications, one is spoilt for choice. I really like the PricewaterhouseCoopers publication Synopsis.

But if you really want to be antisocial and study up a storm, my recommendation is to get on the SARS website and download the recently released third edition of the SARS Capital Gains Tax Guide. It's free! You could pay hundreds for something this comprehensive.

The then minister of finance, Trevor Manuel, announced the implementation of CGT in February 2000 and it all went live on October 1, 2001. The legislation has been revised, polished and repolished ever since. So much so that I don't reckon there are more than a handful of tax nerds who would even claim to know it all.

Fortunately, that's not a problem. Because for the past 10 years, a really great bloke, Duncan McAllister, has patiently sat in SARS and comprehensively documented virtually everything there is to know about CGT and shared it with everyone in the comprehensive CGT guide. All 754 pages of it! It can only be described as a labour of love.

I kid not when I say that we wouldn't know where we were without the CGT guide. SARS has often been accused of just dumping legislation on the table and leaving taxpayers to grope their way around it. Not so with CGT.

So if you were asking me to nominate a South African for a Baobab award this year, I would go for McAllister. Few have gone the extra mile in tax as he has. And for once, I think that there are a great many tax nerds who would agree with me.

• Lester is a professor at Rhodes University, Grahamstown