Terry Baucher introduces the IRD's financial arrangement rules which usually come as a big unwelcome surprise to taxpayers. He also looks at wage theft. And the latest political party tax ideas

In February 2002, in the run up to the invasion of Iraq, then U S Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld, commented;

"Reports that say that something has happened are always interesting to me because as we know there are known unknowns. There are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns. That is to say we know there are some things we do not know, but there are also unknown unknowns. The ones we don't know, we don't know and if one looks throughout the history of our country and other free countries, it is the latter category that tend to be the difficult ones."

This quote was a core theme in my presentation last week to the Financial Advice New Zealand annual conference. The unknown unknowns are also a very difficult category in tax. And what are these unknown unknowns? The ones that trip up people because they didn't know they were there.

Well in New Zealand the biggest culprit in this would be our financial arrangement rules. These rules have been around since 1986 and yet despite their very broad application, are largely unknown.  I have come across CFOs who were completely unaware how they could apply.

Financial arrangements rules apply to just about any financial instrument you can think of. Mortgages, bank term deposit accounts, swaps, bonds, gilts in the UK phrase, all those all caught within it. It's so broad it could apply to season tickets for public transport. And in one case I dealt with we thought that electricity contracts would be caught.  Actually, we were debating whether in fact they were in the stock rules or in financial arrangement rules. Welcome to the arcane world of international tax.

But the financial arrangement rules are very broadly, largely unknown to individuals and they have particular bite in the foreign exchange field. That is where exchange rate movements such as is going on right now with Brexit which is back in the news again, so the Pound will move around.

Two groups of people get caught here. Obviously, investors who have bonds or term deposits denominated in an overseas currency, the value of the New Zealand dollar falls [that is more dollars are required to buy the offshore currency], they make an exchange gain and if the value rises, they have an exchange loss.

Then there are those with, for example, a rental property in the United Kingdom, and they have a mortgage there, it works the opposite way. The Pound may become weaker against the dollar so that in dollar terms, their mortgage diminishes, then that is income. Now on an unrealised basis for most people, this largely doesn't matter, but very abrupt movements which add up to $40,000 on an unrealised basis will pull people into the foreign financial arrangements regime and they then will have to pay tax on unrealised gains.

The classic example I encountered was a client who had substantial property interests and mortgages in the UK.  In year one there was an unrealised $300,000 foreign exchange gain, on the movement on the Sterling and had to cough up $100,000 in tax. The following year, it moved back the other way and she had a $300,000 loss but she never got that tax back. Even though there's a wash up calculation when an arrangement matures or a mortgage rolls over and so of all the unders and overs are taken into account. But if you paid tax too soon in the piece, say you paid tax two years ago and then you find out that you actually never made any gain once everything is all closed out, you'll never get the tax back.  It's one of the harsher parts of the financial arrangements regime.

The other trap is that the arrangements regime will apply to people who have total financial arrangements of $1 million or more and that is a gross amount. What I sometimes see is people may have $500,000 of term deposits and $500,000 of mortgages overseas mortgages and they think that after netting the two off, I’m below the threshold for the regime. Economically, your net worth comes out as nil. But financial arrangements regime takes them in aggregate so therefore the two are added together so the person actually has a million dollars in financial arrangements and is therefore within the accrual part of the regime. That person will be taxed on an unrealised basis.
The financial arrangements regime just the most common trap New Zealand advisors and clients fall into in my experience.

Following on from that, the other area that I'm seeing a lot more of is UK inheritance tax. Inheritance Tax is an estate and gift tax that applies to anyone domiciled in the UK or with assets in the UK.

Domicile, without getting in to too much detail, is a complicated concept, but basically, it’s where your permanent attachments are. I spoke in a previous podcast earlier about the unfortunate New Zealand woman whose Scottish partner died and because they weren't married, she finished up paying £50,000 pounds inheritance tax on the transfer of his interest in the New Zealand property to her.  So that's not the first trap to watch for.

And I'm seeing more and more people caught by this, we have 300,000 Britons in the country. People like me, who've come from Britain, many more still have assets over in the UK. Maybe their children are going backwards and forwards to the UK and working there. And they're all potentially all caught up in the inheritance tax regime.

A common thing that often gets overlooked is the implication of having assets in the UK or burial plots. Famously after Richard Burton died in 1984 the then HM Inspector of Taxes nailed his estate for inheritance tax on the basis that he had retained a burial plot in the village in Wales from which he came. So that was a very expensive burial plot as it turned out. I believe he actually is buried in Switzerland, but that's how arcane the rules around inheritance tax are. It is the great unknown unknown. And as Donald Rumsfeld said, "These unknown unknowns tend to be the difficult ones."

Earlier this week, Andrea Black who runs the excellent blog "Let's Talk About Tax" went drinking with some young people. Actually, she was there to advise a group of hospitality workers who had been caught out as a result of Wagamama going into receivership. And the issue they were talking about is what's called wage theft in the hospitality industry.

This is where the company, an employer, goes bust owing employees thousands of dollars in unpaid wages and salaries.  There is often also a lot of unpaid pay as you earn floating around. There are several issues here. First and foremost, the employees have been left out of pocket and so they want to know what's going on and when they can recover that. Then the tax man is very much often out of pocket. It often emerges that pay as you earn has been unpaid for several months an issue which I've seen this, and which Andrea talks about it as well.

You do wonder how quickly Inland Revenue reacts to this. Now I do hope that one of the things that will come out of Inland Revenue’s business transformation is much swifter responses to issues where pay as you earn falls into arears. My experience is Inland Revenue has let this go on for far too long. I've come across instances where there had been unpaid pay as you earn for going on for four years, which is just an absurd position. Someone there is either deliberately playing the system, in which case they should be hit with the full force of the law or is so hopelessly incompetent they should have been put out of their misery long ago.

Now the other thing that also comes into play for the employees is the unpaid employer KiwiSaver contribution and this adds up to quite a bit. Back in 2016 I spoke to Radio New Zealand about this matter. 

At that time there was over $29 million dollars in outstanding KiwiSaver payments.  In June 2015 1,663 employers had failed to pass on 15.3 million dollars in KiwiSaver payments deducted from employee's salaries. Employees are missing out on this and on the employer contributions and it's a real issue within the industry. Andrea asks whether the Small Business Council looked at this issue. We've delivered our report to the Minister and what I can say this matter did come into discussion during our deliberations.

One other thing on this. There is a tax bill just going through Parliament at the moment, the Taxation (KiwiSaver Student Loans and Remedial Matters) Bill.

It covers a number of matters. One is the question that we talked about previously about people with the incorrect prescribed investor rate. There's also provisions making it easy for Inland Revenue to collect unpaid employer contributions in relation to KiwiSaver and ensuring employers pass on the employee contribution to Inland Revenue.

Hopefully employees will get the investment returns they're missing out on because they haven't been paid or the deductions and employer contributions haven't yet hit their KiwiSaver account.  By the way, submissions on that bill close on Monday so you’ve still got a chance to make a submission in support of that or raising other issues.

Finally, National have released their tax policy for next year.  A number of things they are promising include tax cuts. Particularly they're proposing something which I think is long overdue, and that is indexing tax thresholds. I think this is one of those quite sneaky tax increases that causes bracket creep and pushes people up into higher tax brackets gradually and it's something which is effectively a tax increase by stealth. I think in the interest of transparency it's a good move. 

There's a number of interesting other matters they want to deal with. That said, I'm not entirely sure if you are not a homeowner or rental investor and you're trying to get into the investment property or to rent a property you'd appreciate what they're proposing. They want to dial back the bright line test for residential property from five years to two years and remove loss ring fencing, which is a big break for tax investors.

That brought a fairly forthright denunciation from Jenée Tibshraeny.  She also was less than impressed by the idea of removing the inflation component of interest. It's an arcane point which has been talked about for some time which although it sounds arcane it is actually quite important.

Anyway, that will be the first shots fired in next year's election about tax policy.  All eyes will be on what the coalition will do in next year's Budget. Given that tax thresholds haven't been raised for more than 10 years by that time it’s hard to imagine that they wouldn't try and do something, particularly when they're running a surplus. I mean, cynical tax cutting budgets are not just the preserve of right wing governments. But we shall wait and see.

This article is a transcript of the August 23 edition of The Week In Tax, a podcast by Terry Baucher. This transcript is here with permission. You can also listen below.