The Brad comics show the day-to-day frustrations and challenges of the Tax Department's tax policy team - Brad, his boss, Claudia, and his colleague, Sami - as the team advises and responds to requests from the Tax Minister on the taxation of investment income.

Taxing investment income is all about taxing the income or commercial profit that comes from investments that range from people simply investing directly in, say, bank accounts or rental properties through to people investing directly as "sole traders" or indirectly via, say, companies, trusts or superannuation funds in local or foreign activities like, manufacturing, mining, agriculture, financing, and so on.

The series of seven comics tries to bring to life in simple format a somewhat dry, and sometimes complex, topic as at least some in the Tax Department's tax policy team seek to convince their Tax Minister to embrace positive change to the way investment income is taxed in their country.

The tax laws in Brad's country happen to be strikingly similar to those in Australia.

Click on the image below to view contents and early chapters of Wayne Mayo's books on taxing investment income and resource rent and ORDER OR DOWNLOAD PDF VERSIONS of either or both books.

Taxing Investment Income draws on numerous tables and charts produced by the Kyscope and all the tables in Taxing Resource Rent were produced by MyProject software.

The Kyscope is a computer model that allows users to play around with changes to domestic and overseas income tax treatment of chosen investments. Through its linked set of Microsoft® Excel spreadsheets, users can:

The Kyscope is designed to facilitate the development, implementation and evaluation of business income tax policy measures or to scaffold the exploration of theoretical considerations.

MyProject is a computer package (50.4Mb download) that helps the user assess the financial viability of investment projects after the imposition of a wide range of income, capital gains taxes, royalties and resource rent taxes.

Written in Microsoft® Visual Basic.Net®, MyProject offers an easy-to-use format for analysis of actual or hypothetical data with flexibility over the number of years of analysis, number of capital investments per year and number of products from each project. MyProject analyses the cash flow of projects regardless of the investor, in contrast to the Kyscope which can analyse the position of people investing via a chain of local or international entities and the position of these entities themselves.

MyProject offers an easy-to-use, flexible format and, while being a stand-alone package, also complements the Kyscope package by:

• determining NPVs (as well as rates of return used in the Kyscope)
• allowing for cash flow taxes and royalties (as well as income taxation, including capital gains tax, in the Kyscope)
• allowing the application of income taxation on a real basis (as well as the nominal basis in the Kyscope)
• allowing analysis over a flexible number of years (rather than the 10 in the Kyscope), number of capital investments per year (5 in the Kyscope) and products lines from each project and by allowing actual project data to be used, including for above marginal projects (the Kyscope generates hypothetical data for marginal assets)
• allowing analysis of the lease versus buy decision under practical taxation treatment of leasing ('standard', 'accrual' and 'sale and loan') - the Kyscope, while also handling 'sale and loan' treatment, focusses on 'pure' taxation of leasing via the identification of all separate asset and liabilities involved.

In contrast to the Kyscope, MyProject undertakes analysis purely on a local project basis, regardless of the type of taxpayer investing in the project. The Kyscope can analyse the position of people investing via local or international entities (like companies and trusts) and the position of these entities which themselves might be investing via other local or international entities. The MyProject software is free.

If you have questions on any of these resources .

© Copyright Wayne Mayo 2023