Tax Planning Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 1500 words

Tax Planning - Essay Example Tax avoidance is the process of planning business transactions in a manner that legally minimizes the amount of taxes due. The four maxims of tax planning are built around the premises of helping businesses work around tax liabilities. 1) Businesses turn over profits to entities that fall within lower tax rates. Reducing tax liabilities can be accomplished through both shifting income to lower-tax rate entities and shifting deductions to higher-tax rate entities. 2) Shift taxable income to a later time period as, in present value terms, tax costs decrease and cash flows increase when the liability is deferred to a later taxable year. This should be done taking into consideration the opportunity costs involved due to shifting income to another year as well as the possibility of tax rate changes in the following year. 3) Due to the differences in state and country laws, it is possible to gain tax advantage by shifting income to a lower-rate tax jurisdiction. This opens up planning oppo rtunities of tax planning for companies which have global presence. 4) By shifting income from business activities to more tax-favored instruments like government bonds, companies can take advantage of preferential tax rates. Businesses, therefore, arrange transactions in such a way that income is shifted to heads which are subject to preferential tax rates. Tax planning thus requires the researcher to consider all fields of income generation and the entity, jurisdiction, time and character of income. An important aspect of tax planning is tax research. Tax research is required to determine the tax consequences of a transaction, either before or after the transaction is done. In case of a closed-fact transaction, the facts surrounding the transaction are recorded and hence, can no longer be subject to the client's control. Conversely, an open-fact transaction is one which the business is proposing to undertake and hence is subject to the client's control. In such cases, a tax adviser can help create facts to support the transaction that will help them influence the tax consequences of that transaction. The role of the tax researcher is to determine the optimal business decisions that its client firm should make, as they relate to tax. When the tax consequences for a firm differ among decision alternatives, tax researchers help to identify the most optimal course of action for management to make in order to maximize their after-tax income. Tax research is a six step process that encompasses all activities required by a researcher to understand the transaction and gather data to support it. The first step involves a thorough understanding of the business transaction and the facts surrounding it. It is important for a tax researcher to acquaint himself with the non-tax features of the transaction before moving onto the tax implications. Once the researcher is done analyzing the non-tax features of the transaction; he moves onto the second step, which is identifying the tax issues suggested by the transaction. The identification of issues lead to formulation of tax research questions. The third step involves the most important component of tax research, which is locating the relevant authority to