The nature of income : The intersection of tax, legal and accounting concepts

Income is a concept fundamental to the "common law" of income tax and to the operation of the Income Tax Assessment Acts. But it is a term whose usage has developed from two quite different sources: in legal reasoning, on the one hand, and in commercial and accountancy reasoning on the other. Australian legislation, and consequently the language of Australian judgments, has conflated the ideas inherent in these usages, with confusing results. The problems resulting from the mixture of different streams of reasoning can also be seen elsewhere in the Acts and their interpretation. This article seeks to identify some of the resultant problems and to offer away forward.