Jurisdiction(s):
United Kingdom

Fisher: UK Supreme Court narrows TOAA, requiring individual/spousal transferor with avoidance purpose and rejecting shareholder-as-transferor; implications for HMRC practice, certainty, GAAR and potential Finance Bill change

Published on: 02 January 2024

Published by a Law360 reporter

Legal News

Article summary

For the time being, this ruling chiefly confirms that the reach of the TOAA code is far narrower than HMRC asserted, and should, with luck, deliver long-awaited certainty for taxpayers and their advisers in comparable scenarios going forward, as well as substantially curtail the use of the TOAA provisions in like circumstances, both in current matters and future disputes. As Lady Rose observed at the outset of her judgment, the TOAA regime ranks among the most bewilderingly intricate parts of UK tax law—a striking, if somewhat questionable, accolade given the usual complexity of UK taxation. It is little wonder that the appeals in this matter produced a different result at each stage of the litigation. Further illustrating the tax law’s complex nature, more than ten years have passed before the Supreme Court finally resolved the Fisher dispute at long last, in the end. It was first considered in early 2013 by the First-tier Tribunal of Britain’s Tax Chamber, though the Upper Tribunal’s reference to the Court of Justice of the EU consumed several years...

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