Taxation management and the structure of transactions: Evidences of source of profits and real property gains. An implicit tax perspective (China)

This study investigates two specific types of transactions---source of profits and real property gains---in the Hong Kong tax context as well as how the structure of transactions with tax implications affects taxpayers' and stakeholders' decisions in the context of taxation management. Effective tax planning, among other factors, requires the tax planner who makes investment and financing decisions to consider not only explicit taxes but also implicit taxes [Scholes and Wolfson (SW), 1992; 2002]. This study has two main objectives. First, using 73 and 161 published legal case decisions on locality of profits and gains from real property transactions respectively, this study runs binary logit tests to examine the relative significance of the major factors contributing to judicial decisions on locality of profits and gains from real property transactions. As such, it provides business managers with empirical evidence and insightful thoughts on gaining a proper understanding of the structure of business transactions for the purposes of taxation management. Second, it extensively reviews the corporate tax structure in the Asia-Pacific region, international corporate tax research, and the implicit taxes theories, thereby providing the institutional setting for the above empirical work. The empirical results indicate that the factor, "location of services/work rendered" is exceptionally positive and significant to judicial decisions on source of profits; three factors, namely "financial ability of taxpayer", "circumstances leading to disposal", and "stated or actual intention at time of acquisition of subject property" are statistically significant to judicial decisions on gains from real property transactions. The results of both are robust to the two logit models.