Tax Treaty Case Law around the Globe 2016

S. 415Chapter 36 Australia: Enforcing Tax Claims Cross-Border

Graeme S. Cooper

36.1. Introduction

Attempts to recover tax from individuals who are outside a country can prove difficult. There may be problems initiating the claim for tax and in enforcing it, and while the tax authorities may have significant assistance in their tasks where relevant burdens are placed on the debtor to disprove the revenue authority’s claims, the absence of the alleged debtor may still cause headaches. Pursuing absent debtors may be worth the effort if there are substantial assets available in the jurisdiction, but revenue authorities may not be able to establish whether or not this is the case without being able to interview the debtor, and even in this situation there may still be considerable effort involved: there may be problems effecting the service of court documents, problems securing evidence from which to make a sufficiently reliable assessment of the amount of tax payable, problems establishing the extent of the debtor’s assets and where they are held, problems enforcing a judgment debt against foreign assets, and so on.

Certainly a number of recent developments have made the task of the revenue auth...