This article, which is based on the inaugral address given at the IBFD Tax Lecture Series in Beijing, China, examines the basic foundations and nature of income tax law before going on to offer a unifying theory of taxation law. Income tax law is notoriously complex for a range of reasons. One...

There is an active but unpublicised industry of New Zealand trustees who look after foreigners’ money. Also, taxpayers from other countries sometimes use New Zealand as a haven. Some trustees for foreign funds have a reasonably substantial presence in New Zealand; others may be single-purpose...

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...

The inheritance tax system in New Zealand revolves around an estate duty, levied on deceased estates and a gift duty on inter vivos gifts. There is no capital gains tax. The Estate and Gift Duties Act 1968 does not contain any general anti-avoidance provisions. Avoidance of duty is common....

Section 156 of the Income Tax Act 1976 provides for incentives, calculated according to the increase in exports achieved by a taxpayer beyond exports of that taxpayer in a certain base period. In AGH Finance Ltd v Commissioner of Inland Revenue (1982) 5 NZTC 61,189 the taxpayer had acquired an...

Section 104 of the Income Tax Act 1976 sets out the test for deductibility from assessable income. The article focuses on the issue of time in the test. First, at what stage can an item of “expenditure” be said to have been “incurred” by the taxpayer? Can expenses be estimated or spread...

In Commissioner of Inland Revenue v Smythe [1981] 1 NZLR 673 the Court of Appeal considered whether a lump sum payment provided in lieu of long service leave that had not been taken could be described as a bonus. Section 68 of the Income Tax Act 1976 provides concessional tax treatment for...

Autopoiesis is a post-modern, essentially positivist theory that tries to describe the true nature of law. Its principal tenets are the ideas of self-reproductive growth from reasoning that is self-referential and recursive, relative autonomy from, and “operative closure” against, other...