LexisNexis New Zealand has kindly consented to the classic text, John Prebble The Taxation of Property Transactions (1985) being posted on the SSRN website. Statutory references are to sections as numbered in the Income Tax Act 1976, but apart from re-numbering and reorganisation, the law in the...

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...

This is the second of a series of four articles on the taxation of financial services under a value added tax. The first article considered whether, from a theoretical viewpoint, financial services should be included under a value added tax. It concluded that the arguments in favour of treating...

Exemption of financial services from Value Added Tax (VAT) is commonly accepted as being an anomaly in the New Zealand goods and services tax legislation. While exempting financial services from VAT is attractive to the legislature because it is a simple way of addressing the difficulties of...

We cannot have an income tax without a concept of income. For a number of reasons, our concept of income must be artificial. A principal reason is that income tax law generally taxes the results of legal transactions rather than their underlying economic substance, which causes a dislocation...

This article examines scholarly articles by Mr Robert Mcleod and Dr Geoffrey Hartly that appear earlier in this volume. The author finds that individually, the articles are very welcome contributions to tax law scholarship but together, the articles afford valuable insights into several...

Ordinarily, double tax conventions restrict their benefits to residents of the states that are parties. Moreover where a resident of one state claims relief in respect of income derived from the other state, the claimant must ordinarily be “beneficially” entitled to the income in question....

In connection with the New Zealand Government's review of the taxation of the petroleum extraction industry, the Minister of Energy announced in 1989 that one proposal for reform was to eliminate current deductibilty of drilling and exploration costs

As commercial transactions and tax law have both become more complex, tax practitioners have called for the establishment of procedures whereby taxpayers can find out in advance the official opinion of the revenue authorities as to the tax implications of their proposed transactions. If formally...

Commissioner of Inland Revenue v. New Zealand Plumbers' Merchants Society Ltd. (1983) 6 NZTC 61,632, 6 TRNZ 489 (HC) concerned the interpretation of section 167A of the Income Tax Act 1976 concerning the deduction of trading stock rebates from income. Although the case is limited to...