News

Matt Hayes, Partner KPMG


Professor Bernd Genser,
University of Konstanz (Germany),
with Professor Chris Evans (Atax)
chairing the session

Over 100 senior tax practitioners, tax academics and revenue and treasury officials attended a three day tax reform conference held by Atax in Sydney in late February.

The Australian Business Tax Reform in Retrospect and Prospect Colloquium was sponsored by the Institute of Chartered Accountants in Australia, and organised jointly by Atax Professor Chris Evans along with Professor Rick Krever of Monash University's Taxation Law and Policy Research Institute.

Over 40 papers on all aspects of business tax reform were presented at the conference, and the dinner speech was delivered by Treasury Secretary Ken Henry, Chair of the Review of the Australia''s Future Tax System. The conference was attended by the Commissioner of Taxation, Michael D'Ascenzo, the Chair of the Board of Taxation, Richard Warburton and the new Inspector-General of Taxation, Ali Noroozi, and attracted a high level of media attention.

A number of key messages emerged from the conference proceedings, all of which will feed into the Henry Review. These included the importance of carefully integrating the best theoretical perspectives with sound practice, a concept reinforced in the conference proceedings where papers by international academics were followed by commentaries delivered by senior partners from Australia's leading accounting and legal firms.

The conference also warned against basing tax policy and reform upon short term knee-jerk reactions to the global financial crisis, and the importance of not seeing tax reform as a panacea for all society's problems.

Atax Professor Chris Evans said, "It is important to be careful when devising tax policy to ensure that the tax system is used for its intended purposes – that is, revenue collection from taxpayers – rather than a de-facto welfare distribution system. The clear purpose and role of specific tax policy principles needs to be understood in advance of making decisions about legislation."

The conference proceedings are being edited by Professors Evans and Krever into a book to be published in April by Thomson Reuters.