5 - Truth and Deception

Summary

We owe our first duty to the law and to the stability of society and our second to the courts. Only then can we consider our clients and others. But some lawyers put their clients first (out of concern for their fees), and the rule of law suffers. Key issues include hiding documents, defending apparently ‘guilty’ people and evading tax. Lawyers can ignore their own character development and try to draw distinctions between active and passivedeceit, especially in relation to taxation. We analyse several unethical scenarios, for example, lawyers who encourage some clients to evade tax by characterising it as avoidance and ‘arguably legal’. General morality – that is, consequentialism, Kantian ethics, virtue ethics and Confucian teaching – and the three sets of conduct rules that apply in the PRC, Hong Kong SAR and Taiwan, suggest that good tax lawyers’ efforts to assist their clients to pay less tax within the law will be evident from the transparency of their advice and their accountability in their keeping of proper records. These virtues operate in the context of a wider loyalty to clients: to keep them out of the hands of state authorities investigating taxation infringements.