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Editorial

The Tax Clinic special edition was designed to provide an opportunity for those engaged in providing taxation services to vulnerable taxpayers, as part of the National Tax Clinic Program, to record their achievements to date and more importantly, to discuss the challenges for the future. The Journal of Australian Taxation published a special edition on the National Tax Clinic Program in 2020 with Volume 22(2). At that stage the 10 universities that were the first to establish a tax clinic published a paper outlining the functions and structure of their individual tac clinics and what they had achieved up to that time. This special edition now provides those engaged in the tax clinics to discuss their achievements and what they see as the challenges in the future. There are four tax clinics discussed in the articles contained in this edition and each one has an important story to tell. These stories illustrate the way in which the tax clinics have broadened the reach of their services and have identified vulnerable taxpayers that do not live in the metropolitan areas of Australia but need taxation advice.

In the first article of this special issue, Prafula Pearce explores the opportunities to improve assistance to remote individual regional clients in lodging their tax returns. The Edith Cowan University (ECU) Tax Clinic operating under the NTCP and the recipient of the Australian Government Indigenous and Remote Communities Grant have made several outreach trips to provide tax assistance to remote communities. Based on lessons learnt from the ECU Tax Clinic visit to Broome and Fitzroy Crossing in Western Australia that is more than 2000 kilometres from Perth, Western Australia, and from the interviews conducted with Financial Counsellors in Broome, Fitzroy Crossing, Carnarvon, and Darwin who provide Tax Help services or assist remote individual clients, the paper explores the opportunities to improve assistance to remote individual regional clients in lodging their tax returns.

The second article is written by Connie Vitale and Robert Whait as a joint article covering both the tax clinics at Western Sydney University and the University of South Australia. The Western Sydney University (WSU) and University of South Australia (UniSA) Tax Clinics have been operational for over 6 years commencing in May 2019 and August 2019 respectively. These clinics operate as part of the National Tax Clinic Program (NTCP) that was established by the federal government to provide free tax services to vulnerable Australian taxpayers, provide students with work experience in the tax profession, educate the public regarding the tax system and report systemic tax administration issues to the Australian Taxation Office. Extant literature on tax clinics in the NTCP is focused on establishing clinics from a practical viewpoint or merely reporting statistics of outcomes with some testimonials. This article’s objective is to focus instead on operating tax clinics to achieve the NTCP’s objectives by detailing the clinics successes and its past, present and future challenges so that the clinics and the NTCP can be more effective in meeting the objectives going forward.

The third article is written by Sonali Walpola and Carolyn Drury at the Australian National University Tax Clinic. The ANU tax clinic has been self-funded since 2022 and the clinic has successfully implemented a unique model focussed on empowering low-income and vulnerable taxpayers to engage confidently with the tax system. This article outlines how the ANU tax clinic operates and reflects upon its journey over seven years. The ANU tax clinic has delivered an outstanding educational experience for student interns and volunteers, with student interest growing strongly in recent years. Among the ANU tax clinic’s most distinctive achievements are the engagement of pro bono tax professional mentors who support students in every client consultation, and the establishment of customised tax education workshops for indigenous organisations.

The fourth article is written by Prafula Pearce, Lex Fullarton and Joshua Aston. This paper outlines the establishment and development of the ECU Tax Clinic at Edith Cowan University, detailing its integration within the university environment and its role in providing work- integrated learning opportunities for taxation students. It further examines the creation of the innovative ‘Carnarvon template’ , initially designed to support remote taxpayers in Carnarvon, Western Australia, and the ‘Trips template’ that is currently used by the ECU Tax Clinic to serve communities in the Kimberley region—in excess of 2,000 kilometres from Perth and explores the ‘Hybrid Template’ which is a combination of the two templates. The paper underscores the critical need for pro bono tax clinic services in rural and remote communities of Australia. Drawing on the ECU Tax Clinic’s experiences, the study identifies key success factors and common challenges in establishing effective, low-cost outreach models. These insights aim to inform the development of new clinics under the Federal Government’s expanded National Tax Clinic Program to effectively provide remote and regional taxpayer assistance.

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Volume 27, Issue 04 – Tax Clinic Special Edition

Editorial

The 2025 Volume 27(3) issue of the Journal of Australian Taxation contains five very interesting and yet diverse articles relating to taxation law in Australia, New Zealand, South Africa and Canada.

The first article by Lisa Marriott explores the OECD report outlining ten principles for fighting tax crime that was published in 2017 coupled with a second edition published in 2021 which provides a framework to assist countries in improving tax compliance. The OECD also published a Tax Crime Investigation Maturity Model to help tax authorities self-assess their capabilities to address tax crime. Adopting a descriptive approach and using official documents and information obtained under the Official Information Act 1982, this article uses the OECD framework and the OECD Tax Crime Investigation Maturity Model to evaluate New Zealand’s approach to fighting tax crime. It also provides a critique of the OECD principles and offers suggestions to improve the operationalisation of the principles. The article recommends that future OECD reports include more precise measures of performance, as the principles currently indicate potential, rather than actual performance. Lisa Marriott contends that the principles would further benefit from greater acknowledgment of the potential for technology in addressing tax crime.

The second article written by Muneer Hassan contends that the existing South African VAT Act is intricate to instruct, implement and administer, and exhibits a need for profound improvements. His empirical study presents guidelines to improve the VAT Act, which entails following the lifecycle of a VAT vendor, organising sections into groups, incorporating headings and subheadings, providing clear signposting, and finding the most effective solution to address local challenges. His recommendation also included in the guidelines is that these guidelines should be used to construct a descriptive framework to the VAT Act. This study presents a descriptive framework to re-organising the VAT Act utilising the guidelines employing applied qualitative research as the research methodology. Recommendations provided by interviewees were integrated to improve the descriptive framework. The constructed descriptive framework to the VAT Act marks the first stage in the process of simplifying the South African VAT Act.

The third article is written by Peter McMahon and Aleks Zochowski and examines the precise geographical limits of Australia’s primary indirect tax laws, the Goods and Services Tax (GST) and stamp duty which they contend is of critical importance to taxpayers operating in its coastal waters. In particular this article examines the myriad and diverse Federal, State and Territory laws that are primarily relevant to the identification of those geographical limits. Regarding GST, the article considers the precise meaning of the phrase ‘indirect tax zone’ in the GST legislation and determines that it is only those supplies that are connected with the first 3 nautical miles of Australia’s 12 nautical mile ‘territorial sea’ that fall within the GST net. The authors consider that this position is at odds with clear Parliamentary intention which was to ensure GST applied to supplies connected with the full 12 nautical miles of the territorial sea. They recommend that amending legislation ought to be introduced to clarify the position, and to dispel any uncertainty for taxpayers as to the GST treatment of activities carried out in the country’s full territorial sea. The article then goes on to consider the precise geographical scope of the stamp duty laws of the States and the Northern Territory, and whether stamp duties may be levied on transactions over property located on, in or under a jurisdiction’s coastal waters sea bed. In that regard, the article considers the Duties legislation of each state and the Northern Territory separately.

The fourth article is written by Francois Vaillancourt. He presents evidence on the evolution of both the complexity of the personal income tax system and the compliance costs incurred by personal income tax filers (PIT) in Canada. The complexity is measured using three indicators: length of federal income tax code (1971-2018), number of federal PIT expenditures (1981- 2014) and length of PIT forms (2000-2015). All three indicators show an increase in complexity. The compliance costs of the PIT are calculated using survey information gathered from individual Canadians on time expanded and amount spent the following year for the 1985, 2007, 2018 and 2022 tax filing /calendar years. His results show a decrease in the PIT compliance costs in hours, in total value and as share of GDP and revenues collected. This drop in compliance costs is most likely due to the increasing use of software by tax filers to prepare their tax returns; this allows them, amongst other things, to download information from the Revenue agencies. A tax pain index combining complexity and compliance costs is put forward; its small growth over time may well explain why increasing tax complexity of the PIT in Canada is apparently well tolerated. The article ends with a short review of similar Australian evidence.

The fifth article is written by Dale Boccabella and Norman Hanna. The authors undertake a very detailed analysis of the ‘Charles Apartments’ case which involved the deductibility of an ‘amount’ incurred by a group company in the context of a property development group heavily indebted to an outside lender, and that lender holding loan guarantees from all group companies. The group was not consolidated for income tax purposes. Upon the sale of its only asset, the group company paid the net-proceeds to the outside lender to reduce the group’s overall debt, yet the group company had a loan on foot from another group company to fund development of its only asset. There were differing views between the AAT and the Federal Court of this underlying general law payment transaction, namely, the AAT holding that it was (in part) an interest payment to the intra-group lender and the Federal Court holding it was a payment under the guarantee to the outside lender. From those positions, the income tax deductibility outcome also differed. This article deals with this difference of approach between the AAT and the Federal Court, an issue of considerable significance to similarly placed groups. The article also identifies and discusses what appear to be anomalies and inconsistencies in the litigation to date.

John McLaren, John Minas and Sonali Walpola

Editors 2025

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Volume 27, Issue 03