It's early January and we already have a powerful contender for the title of most spellbinding tax story of 2011.

Witches in Romania are planning to publicly curse – through the flinging about of mandrake plants, cat poo and dogs’ corpses – the country's government because they're extremely upset about facing an income tax for the first time.

New legislation has been imposed by skint authorities who previously hadn't levied the earnings of driving instructors, car valets and embalmers, all of whom will now have to cough up 16% of their wages.

Also hit by the rules are those much-aggrieved sorcerers and sorceresses, as well as astrologers and fortune tellers – which magics one swiftly to the conclusion that the expanded labour tariff is as much a sanction on crackpots and charlatans as it is a tax.

Next: an increased sales levy on newts' eyes and bat wings? It'd be kinder (and let's face it, more amusing) treatment of hex maniacs than that meted out by Nicolae Ceauşescu, the Romanian dictator who was so afraid of black magic that he imprisoned its practitioners during his increasingly bonkers reign of the '70s and '80s.

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