Gift Duty abolished

Brian Fallow in the Herald reports:

The Government is to abolish gift duty, confident any risks to creditor protection or the targeting of social assistance programmes can be met by other laws.

The 125-year-old tax has brought in an average of $2.2 million a year over the past seven years, and on a declining trend.

But officials estimate it imposes $70 million a year in compliance costs on taxpayers, or rather on non-taxpayers, as only about 900 or 0.4 per cent of the 225,000 gift duty statements filed to the Inland Revenue a year disclose a liability to pay the tax.

A sensible move by Peter Dunne. Peter has been a revenue Minister in three separate governments, and has actually a achieved a lot of useful reform.

The good news with the law change is that Kiwblog readers can now donate more than $27,000 per annum to me, without attracting gift duty 🙂