Quite recently the Government has seriously taken up this question of falsified returns, especially in the case of real estate, and is making a systematic inspection of the properties liable for taxation. An immense amount of fraud has already been discovered in the towns, and the case of the rural estates is probably worse. I was lately told of an instance where, to my informant’s knowledge, an estate which adjoins his own has been paying 60 pesetas a year, whereas it should have paid about 2,000. In some parts of the country the large landowners are doing their utmost to oppose the carrying on of the Ordnance Survey, because the effect of it would be to define and make public the extent of their property. An ingenious mode of defrauding the exchequer of succession duties is practised on a gigantic scale. This consists in depositing personal property in the banks in the joint names of all concerned, actual holders and heirs apparent, to the order of any one of them. Thus on the death of the father, the owner of the personal estate, it passes to his son without any legal intervention, and the Treasury is powerless to collect the succession duties. Under the Spanish law as it now stands, if one of the owners of such a joint deposit dies, the deposit pays a proportion of the duties corresponding to the number of names in which it stands: a half if there are two, a third if there are three, and so on. In January, 1910, there were “undefined deposits” (_depósitos indistintos_) as they are called amounting to nearly 519,700,000 pesetas (about £20,788,000) in the Bank of Spain alone, and Alvarado, Moret’s Minister of Finance, obtained a Royal Decree dealing with these deposits. His plan was simple: merely to make the joint deposit liable for the whole duty on the death of any one of those interested. As this would oblige the owner to pay if the heir died first, it is obvious that the practice of depositing in joint names would at once come to an end. But Cobian, Alvarado’s successor in Canalejas’ Ministry, suspended the decree, a proceeding inexplicable in a Minister whose Chief loudly proclaims his democratic principles. Meanwhile the depositors took immediate advantage of the respite afforded them by the suspension of the decree to transfer some 200,000,000 pesetas (about £8,000,000) to banks abroad, and most probably a good deal more will go the same way. The Religious Orders are fighting the decree tooth and nail, because while legally formed associations, who do not desire to conceal their capital, do not object to the decree, illegal associations, who have reasons for secrecy as to their affairs, find in the system of joint deposits an easy way of escaping their liabilities. It must be remembered that most of the Religious Orders now established in Spain are illegal, the Concordat only allowing of two, together with a third not yet named.