Re Donald (1977) 2 TRNZ 275 dealt with valuing a wife's interest in a bank account held jointly with her husband, on his death. Somers J held that the wife did not have any beneficial interest in the account until the husband's death, when she acquired a right to the whole account. This note...

The paper deals with the taxation of transactions involving the sale of land where the price received includes a non-cash element, most commonly, a mortgage to the vendor. Generally, such transactions are taxable in New Zealand only when the vendor is in the business of selling properties. The...

Stirling v. Miller & Poulgrain [1980] 2 NZLR 402 (SC) involved a firm of solicitors that negligently delayed the conveyancing for a property being transferred into a family trust. As a result, the price paid by the trust was $90,000 was more than it would have been had the conveyancing been...

The theory that law may best be understood as an autopoietic system has gained considerable ground since Luhmann advanced it in 1981. Nevertheless, there have been few endeavours to apply the theory in any practical way or to employ it to analyze particular areas of law. In a recent paper,...

The President signed § 7701(o) of the Internal Revenue Code, the first U.S. statutory general anti-avoidance rule, or “GAAR,” into effect on 30 March 2010. The birth of the American GAAR was buried in § 1409 (a) of the Health Care and Education Reconciliation Act of 2010 (H.R. 4872). With...

A comment on the case of Grieve v Commissioner of Inland Revenue (1982) 5 NZTC 61,145. The taxpayer had run a loss-making business which he had continued to deduct from other income. Eventually, the Commissioner decided to disallow further deductions. The court upheld the Commissioner's...

If interpreted in a strict legal sense, beneficial ownership rules in tax treaties would have no effect on conduit companies because companies at law own their property and income beneficially.In consequence, courts and scholars have adopted surrogate tests that they attempt to employ in place...

This paper comprises a transcript of the oral addresses and discussion at a colloquium that compared the general anti-avoidance rule of income tax law with the civil law doctrine of Rechtsmissbrauch (abuse of law) and similar doctrines in eight jurisdictions: Germany, Croatia, New Zealand,...

When taxpayers discover that their transactions have unwanted tax consequences, they routinely rely on the unwind doctrine found in Internal Revenue Service Revenue Rulings 80-58. Nowadays, “unwinding” has become a “common if not ubiquitous feature of tax practice.” This article finds...