Country-wide policy
A third of the Income Tax Act cannot be read from the file the Government publishes
Every statute on the Ministry of Justice law portal is a scan of the printed page with a text layer the publisher produced by recognition. For most of the immigration statutes that layer covers every page and the recognition is readable. For the two longest and most consequential statutes it does not. In the Income Tax Act, 102 of 295 pages carry no text at all; in the Customs Act, 46 of 155. The missing pages are not blank and not damaged - they are perfectly legible pictures - but nothing can be searched in them and nothing can be quoted from them. That bounds what anyone can responsibly say about those two Acts. It is why the statement that the Income Tax Act contains no definition of residence is recorded here as a reading of page images rather than as a quotation, and why the Customs Act's Second Schedule is cited from the agency that administers it instead of from the Act.
Topics it changes
What it requires
- Treat an absence in these two Acts as unproven rather than as a finding
- Check the page images before relying on anything not found in the text
At a glance
- Income Tax Act pages with no text layer
- 102 of 295
Counted by extracting each page of the publisher's file on its own and counting those that return nothing
- Customs Act pages with no text layer
- 46 of 155
Counted the same way; the missing pages include the contents list and the whole of Part VIIIA
- National Insurance Act pages with no text layer
- 20 of 95
Counted the same way
- Immigration and nationality statutes
- Every page carries text
- Free Movement of Skilled Persons Act
- No text layer at all; read through an extraction service
- Second Schedule to the Customs Act
- Not in the published file
What the law says
«accordance with the provisions of the Schedule.»The file the portal publishes for the Customs Act begins at section 19 and contains only the valuation Schedule. The Second Schedule, which carries the passenger and returning-resident exemptions, is not in it.
«(i) to any person residing in the Island
fiom any kind of property whatever, whether
situated in the Island or elsewhere; and»Quotable because this page carries text. The definitions in section 2 mostly do not.
Practical notes
A second effect of the same recognition is milder but easy to mistake for a gap. The publisher's software often fails on the section number at the head of a paragraph - section 15 of the Aliens Act opens as E-(1) - so an automatic check of which sections are printed reports sections as missing when the text is there in full. We checked the sections flagged that way in both immigration Acts and found every one of them present.
The portal has two more faults worth knowing about. Its browse index and its gazette index are driven by an endpoint that redirects an anonymous reader to an administrator login, so neither list returns anything; statutes can only be reached by guessing the address from the title. And its certificate chain omits the intermediate, so an ordinary client refuses the connection until the missing certificate is supplied by hand.
Where the publisher offers the same statute at two addresses the files differ. The Law Revision Act served from the statute page has 58 pages and starts at section 7; the one served from the legislation directory has 56 and starts at section 1.