The Office of Square Trading, the government body overseeing the sale of all rectangular shapes, has been investigating the illegal sale of squares.
"There is a massive black-market trade in squares, oblongs and rectangles," said Rex Tangle, chair of the Office of Square Trading. "People are circumventing the traditional markets of squares, and instead buying them under the counter."
This illegal trading is costing the government millions in lost Shape Tax revenue.
"Our sister organisation, the Office of Elliptical Trading, has not seen this same rise," said Tangle. "Where we're seeing people secretly buying rectangular shapes without paying the necessary shape tax, circles, ovals and ellipses are still being sold legitimately."
This tax evasion scam has gone largely unnoticed for so long due to a mislabelling of shapes, according to Tangle.
"We've seen perfect squares being sold is polygons," he said. "All polygons are tax exempt, due to them not being luxury shapes. We even saw one square being sold as two triangles to avoid paying tax. I think this is why circles and ovals have avoided being scammed this way, as it takes an infinite number of triangles to make a circle. And that would be expensive, even if the triangles are sold at a penny per triangle."
New procedures are being put into place to crack down on this illegal trading in squares, forcing the clear labelling of squares as squares and not as multiple triangles or a four sided polygon. Additionally, the Office of Square Trading is to be given new powers to seize and detain anybody falsifying the shape being sold.
