You were fully reimbursed (under a nonaccountable plan) for these expenses in the same year.

"So to give up not only your own currency but all the rights that go with it to a nonaccountable central bank, where you would be only one of 12, would be quite fundamental," she told The Sunday Telegraph.

The lawyers' conclusion said: "Because the air travel arrangement allows employees to retain the purchase price adjustments, the arrangement does not require the taxpayer's employees to return amounts in excess of substantiated expenses and is, thus, a nonaccountable plan."

Business expenses paid out of an nonaccountable plan are deductible from the employee's taxable income only as miscellaneous itemized deductions, and even then, they are only deductible if the expenses are equal or greater than 2% of the employee's income.

In the tenacious defense of their privileged position as tax-exempt, nonaccountable institutions, America's voluntary hospitals may unwittingly have fostered among the public the impression that national health insurance need not be a high priority, because the friendly neighborhood hospital will act as the health insurer of last resort.

But the advisory by the I.R.S. lawyers, whose work was said not to have been reviewed at top levels of the agency, has caused an uproar by declaring specifically that a company plan for treating expense allowances and reimbursements is made "nonaccountable" if it gives employees benefits arising from company-paid tickets.