Business Structures and Taxation Advice

One of the certainties in life is taxes.

When most people think of taxes, they think of the ATO and income tax and maybe capital gain tax.

For optimal business structure, other forms of tax also have an impact such as stamp duty, payroll tax, land tax and GST.

Other laws that may have an impact on a business structure, such as bankruptcy laws and Family Law, must also be taken into account.

There are often a range of options that can be used to achieve your commercial objectives. For some of those options, taxation or other effects may cause the business venture to lose its commercial viability.

Our tax team is known for being innovative in developing solutions to achieve our clients’ business objectives.

Taxation is dynamic, continually changing. We keep abreast of all the changes with a particular focus on how it affects business structures.

Structuring a Business

Structuring is not limited to whether you use a company, a certain form of trust or a partnership. It also includes various commercial agreements.

Rouse Lawyers can assist you in the following areas:

• structuring and restructuring a businesses in a manner that is CGT and stamp duty effective;
• implementation of estate plans comprising assets in various private entity structures;
• assistance in dealing with contrary ATO positions, including preparing objections and responses to position papers;
• assessing the impact of capital gain tax on a particular transaction;
• assistance with mergers or acquisitions, and assistance leading up to a business sale to provide the best results for you;
• joint ventures and other commercial arrangements in structuring transactions;
• various forms of rollovers;
• assistance in dealing with issues relating to personal services income;
• assistance with access to the small business CGT concessions;
• alternatives for addressing Division 7A;
• various alternatives for achieving Asset Protection; and
• tax issues generally.

Restructuring a Business

At Rouse Lawyers we aim to provide you with the optimum structure for the operation of your business or the holding of investments.

During your lifetime, at some stage it will be necessary to make changes to your structure for one or more of the following reasons:

• growth in your business creating new objectives (for example, the need to protect valuable business assets against claims, the desire to introduce equity participants such as key employees);
• changes in the law;
• changes in your circumstances (for example, approaching retirement and a wish to restructure ownership of the business for the next generation; and
• remedy of inappropriate business structure by another adviser.

ATO Disputes

The ATO is quite active in reviewing business taxation arrangements.

In certain situations, the tax office may take a position overly favourable to itself, misunderstand the law or the facts to impute unwarranted tax liability to your business.

Very positive results can be obtained by engaging our tax team at the early stage of a dispute with the ATO.

We can put forward a thorough legal analysis of your position in response to an ATO position paper or objection to an amended assessment.

Our Recent Work

Our recent work in advising our clients on business structures and taxation:

• advice on the pre-CGT tax status of bonus shares in an old deceased estate;
• advice on whether dividends received by a self-managed superannuation fund from a private company constituted non-arm’s-length income (which would be taxed at the top marginal rate);
• restructure of a pre-CGT business from a single trust into several trusts in a manner that was not liable for stamp duty to accommodate succession of the business;
• preparation of submissions and objections to assessments relating to the small business CGT concessions in circumstances where the ATO included assets of children who had worked in the business (successful outcome);
• successful submission to the ATO for the amendment of the tax return lodged two years previously to claim the small business CGT concessions (overlooked by a previous adviser); and
• assistance with assessing whether a client satisfied $6 million net asset value test.

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