After a period of consultation, it has been decided that the Revenue should be empowered to issue legally-binding rulings in favour of taxpayers only where the relevant transaction has already taken place. This paper considers the reasons for having binding rulings, and argues that those reasons...

The schedular system of income tax in the UK frequently comes under attack, not least in relation to the distinctions it draws between the tax treatment of the employed and the self-employed. However, on examination, it appears that non-schedular systems of taxation share both these distinctions...

Australian taxation law has been criticised for many years for its difficulty to read and understand. The Tax Law Improvement Project (TLIP) was established in December 1993 to rewrite in plain language Australia’s income tax legislation. The primary purpose of this study is to test...

The UK government recently introduced legislation to treat the qualifying distribution on a repurchase of shares in the same way as ‘foreign income dividends’. This paper examines and criticises this reform from two perspectives. First, there is no underlying rationale for such an approach....

This article, acknowledging the potentially important general attractions of the allowance for corporate equity (ACE), looks at some of its more specific implications. On corporate taxes, the article looks at questions about the implied revenue-neutral rate of corporation tax (and redistribution...

Governments often try to reduce the complexity of personal income tax systems by decreasing the number of tax filings. The 1998 reform of the Spanish income tax system has followed this approach by adjusting withholding on earned income to the income tax liability. In this paper, we assess to...