A note on Woodley v. Rod Elmiger Ltd. (1983) 6 NZTC 61,514 (HC) Wallace J, which involved the imposition of penalties for a knowing failure to pay PAYE. Although the Commissioner can ultimately hold the employee responsible for PAYE, the penalty imposed on the employer in this case reflects 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...

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...

Section 67 of the Income Tax Act 1976 taxes as income certain gains on the sale of land that would ordinarily be classed as capital. Several proposals were made to repeal the section or severely to limit its effect. The article argues that the section contains a number of flaws, though none that...

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...

Does a payment paid to a contractor as an incentive to complete the contract early constitute a redundancy payment under section 68 of the Income Tax Act 1976? Thorburn v. Commissioner of Inland Revenue (1983) 6 NZTC 61,618 (HC) held that it did constitute a redundancy payment, since one of the...

Kenneth James Ltd. v. Commissioner of Inland Revenue (1983) 6 NZTC 61,565 related to the assessability of profits on the sale of certain parcels of land under section 65(2)(e) of the Income Tax Act 1976. The section applies to profits or gains derived from the sale of property if the business of...