Found this short but not so sweet article in one of our national dailies. These kinda articles crop up quite a bit in our dailies. I’m not really sure if most are cases of poorly worded answers in Parliament or simply our newsmen being clueless about the contents of their own writing. No, I really think its the fault of our local journalist this time. No amount of quoting from a reliable source should excuse this kinda reporting. No heads, no tails. Just a remarkably twisted creature borne of quoting an answer without its question preceding (because we newspaper readers are mind readers, you see), with liberty granted us to freely and completely take it out of the context from which it was first meant to mean because the idiot fella who wrote it probably needed to submit an article short enough to fill that tiny slot under National news.
English translation: To those familiar with the tax laws, this piece of news is both silly in its effort to be squashed into one paragraph and, in a word, useless. Here, reproduced in all its short and hanging glory:-
THE five per cent service tax will not be abolished as it was a major source of revenue for the government. Deputy Finance Minister Datuk Kong Cho Ha said the tax was only imposed on restaurants that had an annual financial turnover of RM3 million, unlike the previous amount of RM500,000. He was replying to a question from Mohd Nor Othman (BN-Hulu Terengganu) yesterday.
