Category: Tax Policy
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Property transactions and clearance certificates
The Tax and Superannuation Laws Amendment (2015 Measures No 6) Bill 2015 is now law (just awaiting Royal Assent). I don’t like it at all… But we now need to understand that from 1 July 2016 a purchaser of certain CGT assets, being asset valued at $2 million or more that are taxable Australian real property or…
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The end of tax depreciation schedules
I don’t know if the Quantity Surveyors have worked it out yet, but they have the most to lose from the changes to negative gearing that are currently being discussed. Labor is promising to remove negative gearing from all purchased buildings that are not new buildings from 1 July 2017. And the Government is considering…
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Tax “expenditures”
The yearly “tax expenditure statement” has been released (http://www.treasury.gov.au/PublicationsAndMedia/Publications/2016/TES-2015). What is a tax expenditure? Its a negative tax. Effectively it is a tax concession so that certain income is taxed less than the “norm”. For example, super is taxed at 15% generally, which is less than most marginal tax rates. So what are the big…
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Arrr, the Greens
The Greens have done it again. When you put out a press release titled “Axing just 4 unfair tax breaks would plug Budget revenue hole” you are going to get me excited. With a yearly budget deficit of $35-40 billion I was desperate to see what 4 tax breaks can raise this amount each year. But it…
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Innovation Tax Changes
Why does “innovation” have anything to do with tax changes? In the Government’s Innovation Statement most of the expenditure is making tax changes. Tax is a revenue raising device… Not a method to change people’s actions. When you use tax policy to do anything other than raise revenue you get bad policy. But here are…
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What are we waiting for…
Each December I try to wrap up the year with the tax promises that have not quite made it into law. While the list has VERY, VERY SLOWLY, getting shorter, there are still a number of measures that are yet to get in to the tax laws. And remember, after the last election, this Government…
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What a waste of time
It is stupid tax policy made worse… From 1 July 2016 there will be a 10% non-final withholding tax on payments made to foreign residents that dispose of certain property. The effect of this will be that where a foreign resident disposes of Australian property, the purchaser will be required to withhold and pay to…
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Please Fairfax, think…
Once again Fairfax journalists are showing how little they know about tax. Recently, the master of the tax mistake, Michael West, wrote about some recent tax amendments that have been blocked in the Parliament… The second is an amendment to compel multinational companies to file, as do their Australian-listed peers, proper financial statements, and not…
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And so there is another scheme to avoid Division 7A
A few weeks after 4 December 1997 I was told about my first Division 7A avoidance idea. And by mid 2008 the first amendment to Division 7A came about to undo this idea (the old section 109UB to stop trusts loaning corporate UPEs to owners). Since then I have been asked lots of times to…
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More Wow!
I was thinking about yesterday’s post and I have a strange thought. If I have a CGT asset owned by a company I am not going to get the CGT discount. But if I use the rollover from yesterday’s post to move the CGT asset to a trust and sell it the next day I…
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