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18 Austl. Tax F. 3 (2003)

handle is hein.journals/austraxrum18 and id is 1 raw text is: A Conflict of Duty -A Federal Approach to the Tax Treatment of Goodwill and Other Intangibles Michael Walpole* Introduction This paper focuses principally on goodwill as a form of intangible property and on one of the different approaches to taxing transfers of such property under state and federal taxation law in Australia. It is in the nature of such things that detailed technical analysis of provisions impacting on business must be placed in proper context and applied to the circumstances of the taxpayer concerned. In the complex areas of capital gains tax (CGT), goods and services tax (GST) and stamp duty in Australia the facts are critical to every problem situation. It is possible, nevertheless to identify trends and outcomes and to generalise a little in order to evaluate the outcomes of tax policy for fairly large groups of taxpayers and parts of the economy. With this in mind, what follows is principally an analysis of the CGT, GST and stamp duty provisions that impact mainly small to medium sized enterprises in the event of a sale of business undertaking. The tensions created by the application of the detailed provisions provide interesting ground for analysis of the outcomes from the point of view of federal tax policy. * Michael Walpole is an Associate Professor and Associate Director (Teaching) at ATAX, UNSW This article was accepted for publication on 12 December 2002.