This chapter seeks to provide an overview of the structure and policy of Australian income taxation for tax advisors and tax students. It sets out the criteria by which the provisions and practice of the Australian income tax system, described in the following chapters, can be evaluated. It will...

This article explores the compliance burden imposed by the value added tax (VAT), which has traditionally been recognised as one of the more onerous taxes so far as compliance by business taxpayers is concerned. It compares the UK's VAT compliance burden with that experienced elsewhere in the...

The nature of “goodwill” for tax purposes was an important issue in Australia long before the adoption of the Commonwealth income tax, with the relationship between goodwill and sales of business premises a central issue in colonial stamp duty assessments (and consequent litigation)....

In this article, the authors discuss a recent Australian High Court case and argue that Australia's legislative framework dictating the distinction between capital and current expenses is inadequate and poses unnecessary judicial roadblocks.The High Court of Australia's October 16 decision in...

World events in the first decade of this century led many to question the state of the international tax regime and the role it could play in solving national fiscal problems. In 2012, leaders of the Group of 20 (G20) set the OECD an ambitious agenda of working out how tax base erosion and...

We can pay for our social policy proposals through philanthropy, some kind of user pays arrangement or through taxation. For most of the last century, we have increasingly relied on taxation as the method of financing our expanding welfare state and our growing expectations of citizenship...

In most federal systems, state governments are funded through a combination of direct fiscal transfers from the central government, and the revenue they collect directly from locally adopted taxes. Ethiopia is a federal polity, but follows a slightly different path in the case of its most...

A significant cause of compliance costs for taxpayers is legal uncertainty resulting from ambiguity in the law and indistinct borders between differing tax rules. The self-assessment principles found in most modern tax systems require taxpayers to interpret the law, with the risk of penalties if...

The notional purpose of tax treaties is to prevent double taxation and tax evasion. The actual purpose is to reallocate taxing rights between an investor's home jurisdiction (the residence state) and the host jurisdiction (the source state). The effect is to reduce or remove the taxing rights of...

In contrast to the VAT regime, income taxation in the European Union (EU) remains almost fully non-harmonised. A number of factors suggest the possibility that harmonisation of direct taxes in the EU may not be as far-fetched as many believe. The first is the compulsion of mounting economic and...