New Zealand law provides for no special tax consequences on the formation of trusts. Transfers to trusts are taxable or non-taxable pursuant to the same rules that apply in respect of transfers to other people or entities. However, because there is more likely to be an element of gift in...

Under the New Zealand Income Tax Act 1994, taxpayers aggregate their gross income and subtract allowable deductions and losses carried forward from earlier years. The result is taxable income. The statutory rules for the taxation of trusts are set out in subpart HH of the Act. There are four...

In the mid 1990s, New Zealand began a project to rewrite the country’s income tax legislation. The first step of the rewrite was to reorder and reenact the 1976 Income Tax Act as the Income Tax Act 1994. Although the rewrite attempted clarify and simplify the legislation to make it more...

Historically, courts have been unwilling to adopt a purposive approach to the interpretation of tax statutes. In 1996, as part of a process of rewriting the Income Tax Act 1994, Parliament inserted a number of provisions into the Act that appeared to be calculated to require the courts to...

“Ectopia” is a label given here to a feature of tax law that distinguishes it from most other forms of law. Income tax law is dislocated from the facts to which it relates. This dislocation leaves a gap, or “ectopia” between tax laws and the economic facts of the transactions or...

Section 156 of the Income Tax Act 1976 permits exporters to make certain deductions when calculating their assessable income. In order to qualify for an export incentive deduction the court in Preece v Commissioner of Inland Revenue (1981) 4 TRNZ 379 held that the applicant must be the owner of...

The English version of this paper can be found at: http://ssrn.com/abstract=1473612 The article compares the general anti-avoidance rule of income tax law with the civil law doctrine of abuse of law (Rechtsmissbrauch, abus de droit) in eight jurisdictions: Germany, Croatia, New Zealand,...