TOFA - A new world of economic substance? presentation

Published on 13 Feb 13 by NATIONAL DIVISION, THE TAX INSTITUTE

At its essence, TOFA attempts to systematically align the tax treatment of financial arrangements towards their economic substance rather than their legal form.

This presentation examines:

• how do the economic substance provisions work in practice?
• when does the economic substance approach not apply in practice, i.e. what might be the limits of this economic substance approach?

Issues considered include:

• economic substance under accounting principles
• interactions with other parts of the Act that impose non-economic substance-based approaches
• impact of tax character on substance-based analyses
• deliberate design features in Div 230 that move away from economic substance
• consideration of the synthetic disposal and non-disposal rules.

Author profile

Phillip Cole CTA

Phillip is Head of Tax, Australia and New Zealand at J.P.Morgan. He has spent nearly 20 years working in the internal tax functions at both Australian-based and foreign financial institutions, including eight years at the Commonwealth Bank of Australia. His experience covers the spectrum of tax issues affecting financial institutions with a particular focus on domestic banking issues, including extensive involvement in the TOFA reforms. Prior to corporate life, he spent seven years in chartered accounting. - Current at 12 January 2017

More by Phillip COLE

• TOFA - A new world of economic substance? paper - 13-February-2013
• TOFA - impacts of the various elections paper - 07-February-2008
• Tax relevant products - current issues paper - 17-February-2006

Click here to expand/collapse more articles by Phillip COLE.