"Q: The question – when you... I say that the company also at that stage late in the tender believed after consultation that it had purchased a right in the land in 2018 as well, after consulting and examining all the documents.
A: Not after any consultation, the matter of the percentage refund is that they looked at whether we were able to issue a permit within the stipulated time period, it is possible to request a refund of the percentage between 6% and 5% and that's it, there was no discussion, no consultation, where do you get it from,
Q: Were you involved in the preparation of the document?
A: Nope.
Q: You weren't. So you don't know if there was a discussion or...
A: No, I know that if there was, as I said in the original report, that if there was an issue that arises in an unusual way for other cases in which we acquired a right in real estate and we managed to issue a permit within the period of time that allowed us to receive a percentage refund of purchase tax, if this issue had come up for discussion then it would have come to me, since it did not reach me, so I know that it is something technical that they did here that they checked the period of time in which they were able to issue the permit. They saw that he complied with the rules for amending the assessment and requesting a percentage refund, and that's what they did.
Q: And they still believed,
A: Nothing has changed...
Q: Nothing has changed, they thought it was a real estate transaction.
A: Normal, as the contract predicts to be."
- It should be said that the committee did not make it easy for Mr. Friedman in his cross-examination, and many questions were also asked by me, as the chairman of the committee, in order to clarify the matter of the discovery of a legal error in the self-assessment, the question of the accompaniment provided by the Firon firm, or the involvement of the Firon firm in the matter of amending the assessment, or the grievances that the appellant might have made against the Firon firm due to the reported report (see pages 38-42 of the transcript).
Mr. Friedman clarified in his testimony and in response to the questions of the committee chairman, that the firm was aware of the filing of the requests to amend the assessments, that the firm's area of expertise is not in complex taxation, but in the routine transactions in which the appellant engages, and that for complex transactions, the appellant is assisted by an accounting firm and not by a law firm. In addition, Mr. Friedman reiterated that the appellant did not identify that the "Buyer's Price" tenders differ from regular ILA tenders in terms of taxation, since the lease contract misled her into thinking that it was a "regular" tender at the tax level, and that the appellant did not identify in real time, at the time of reporting to the respondent, that the rest of the documents (the appendix to the special conditions and the construction contract, as well as the documents sent by the control company) change the legal situation on its face. And only after receiving external tax advice did she realize that she had made a legal mistake.