Tax Facts contains news and alerts relating to tax practice, for the benefit of accountants and other professionals in public practice. Please click on the links below for recent issues. You may also like to peruse Tax Facts by topic category - topics are listed below to the right.
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In brief: A tax practitioner has failed to overturn the assessment of funds received over several years from companies of which he was the sole director or otherwise controlling mind. His contention was that the Administrative Appeals Tribunal had found that he genuinely believed that the receipts constituted loans from the companies, and that that belief should be imputed to those companies, given his control of them. The taxpayer submitted that such common belief was sufficient to establish the character of the receipts as loans. The Federal Court, however, dismissed his appeal, finding no error of law by the Administrative Appeals Tribunal in upholding the Commissioner’s assessments.
More: The law has long recognised that a director (including a sole director) may contract with their company, although necessarily doing so as agent for their company. However, this case is a salutary lesson – perhaps counterintuitively to what some practitioners would regard as the effect – that the subjective intentions of the director may not be sufficient to stamp any transaction between them with the character desired. The taxpayer failed because he had not proved that the receipts were the proceeds under loan contracts, thus failing to discharge his onus of showing that the Commissioner’s assessments were excessive. Rather than evidence merely of the taxpayer’s state of mind, it was an objective assessment of all the circumstances surrounding the receipts that was determinative. No interest was paid on the purported loans or recorded in any books or tax returns and there was a lack of other documentary evidence, apart from loan agreements entered into well after the receipts. (Rowntree v C of T [2018] FCA 182)
In brief: Much has been said about the Aussiegolfa decision (now on appeal to the Full Court), in which the Federal Court determined that an SMSF had breached the sole purpose test and also exceeded the 5% threshold for in-house assets. The relevant investment was in a unit of student accommodation, acquired under the DomaCom Fund, and a daughter of the SMSF’s sole member was one of 3 students who leased the unit. The member is a state manager for DomaCom and it was admitted that the arrangements were intended to test the use of residential property under the DomaCom system for related parties of SMSFs.
More: The sole purpose test was breached because a purpose of the SMSF in acquiring units in the DomaCom Fund was to provide accommodation for the sole member’s daughter. But, in relation to the in-house assets breach, it was a critical finding that the sub-fund established for the property acquisition under the DomaCom Fund constituted a separate trust. The members of the sub-fund were wholly entitled to all the income and capital of the sub-fund, to the exclusion of all other members of DomaCom. Further, it was held that the DomaCom responsible entity owed no fiduciary duties to those other members in respect of the sub-fund. So the sub-fund, even though constituted under a single managed investment scheme and governed by the constitution of the scheme, was held to be a separate trust. This decision serves as a good reminder of the versatility of trusts law. Even though we are accustomed in practice to specific types of trusts (e.g. discretionary trust, child maintenance trust, etc), each typically constituted under a single document, these are not precise species recognised in trusts law. Trusts can be created in many ways and there is enormous flexibility in the terms that can be encompassed. This is part of the reason for the special place of trusts in common law countries and their particular attraction to tax practitioners. (Aussiegolfa Pty Ltd v C of T [2017] FCA 1525)
Tax planning arrangements can fail for a number of reasons. One of those reasons has little to do with technical tax rules. With a real-life example, this episode of Tax Solutions illustrates how tax planning can go wrong because of a fatal legal flaw in the underlying transactions or circumstances on which the tax plan is based. With the result that the practitioner involved is highly exposed.
The small business CGT concessions provide very substantial benefits in situations where they apply. And given the policy intent to direct the concessions to business assets, one of the central conditions that must normally be satisfied is the ‘active asset test’.
This episode of Tax Solutions emphasises a class of CGT assets that achieve a special status for the purposes of the small business CGT concessions. Those assets continue as active assets indefinitely – retaining that status even long after they have ceased being used in any business controlled by the owners!
Widely drafted beneficiary classes in discretionary trusts can create headaches in dealing with various State taxes. A recent example is Victoria’s new 3% additional duty on foreign buyers of residential property – where a trustee is the buyer and a family beneficiary lives overseas. A starker example that applies in all States and Territories is payroll tax grouping of businesses controlled by family relatives, where at least one of the businesses is operated by a discretionary trust.
Having extraordinarily wide beneficiary classes is an outdated practice that creates problems, rather than serving any useful purpose. There is really no point in including a whole range of relatives who are never intended to benefit. A narrow class of beneficiaries is required, with a simple and practical mechanism to add others to whom it is desired to distribute.
Frustrations with ATO views about UPEs of corporate beneficiaries have led to companies more frequently being used to acquire and operate small and medium sized businesses. But the problem is not discretionary trusts owning businesses, it is Division 7A. And there will usually be ways to deal with Division 7A anyway.
Some advisers believe that a business owner can still access the small business CGT concessions on a future business sale, by selling shares in the company that owns the business. But how realistic is it to hope that that is the way things will turn out. This edition of Tax Solutions emphasises 2 reasons why clients with a business owned by a company may not actually benefit from the CGT concessions.
One of the best things you will ever do for some of your small business clients is to deliberately trigger a CGT event and capture the small business CGT concessions. In the right client circumstances, this strategy can produce several very substantial benefits. That will particularly be so if 100% CGT exemptions can be achieved without duty applying to the transaction.
A restructure for this purpose should always be kept in mind, particularly for clients who may grow to the point where they can no longer satisfy either the $2M turnover test or $6M net asset value test. But it warrants greater consideration at the moment, given the apparent increased political risk of changes to CGT concessions.
