En fasad av neutralitet? - En neutralitetsstudie av fåmansföretagens effekt på svensk beskattning

Sammanfattning: To understand the effect of tax law on the Swedish society, continuous investigation and evaluation of regulations is required. With this in mind, this thesis investigates the effect of close company taxation on society from a neutrality perspective. Through a deep analysis, it becomes clear how neutral the regulations for close company taxation are when choosing the form of association. Based on this analysis, proposals are then made for how the legislator can further strengthen neutrality within close company taxation. The neutrality principle, simply put, means that tax rules should not influence the actions individuals choose when faced with different options. This is motivated by the theory that if tax law does not affect the individual, the rational individual will choose the most efficient option. If tax rules influence the choice, there is therefore a risk that the individual will not choose the most efficient option. For this reason, the neutrality principle is a cornerstone for creating an economically efficient tax legislation. In this thesis, the neutrality principle is divided into micro and macro neutrality. Micro neutrality is defined as tax law not influencing individual action choices. Macro neutrality is defined as non-intervention, which means that if tax rules lead to resource allocation within society, the rules are not to be considered macro neutral. The study is based on two different analyses based on which of these definitions of neutrality is used. During the analysis of micro neutrality in the rules, a comparison is made between the taxation of service, individual business, close company business, unlisted companies with other ownership and unlisted companies without other ownership. The analysis is based on different income levels where the retention, defined as net income relative to gross income, is compared between the different forms of association. In addition, the different tax dispositions are compared over a five-year period. The analysis finds that close company taxation is advantageous at all income levels, especially at incomes over a million Swedish crowns, and that the rules therefore cannot be considered micro neutral. Based on this, a literature review is carried out on both the legal and economic debate on close company taxation in order to investigate the effect of the rules on macro neutrality. The literature presents investigations and arguments for the effect of the rules on society. Based on an analysis of the literature, it can be concluded that the rules seem to allocate resources in favour of men, native-born, major cities, consulting activities and high-income, while women, foreign-born, rural areas, government employees and low-income seem to be disadvantaged. Therefore, the rules cannot be considered macro neutral. Based on these results, proposals are made for how the legislator can further strengthen neutrality within close company taxation. The first option is a taxation of close companies under the threshold of 25 precent, something that has been proposed by both the legislator and the literature. This option would have increased micro neutrality in all aspects and largely established neutrality between small businesses and unlisted companies, at least among those companies with several employees. However, the aforementioned resource allocation would probably have only been affected to a small ex-tent as the rules are still advantageous compared to individual business and income from service, especially at high income levels. The second option proposes a template-based taxation of close companies where half of the dividend is taxed as a service like today's dividend over the threshold and half is taxed as capital like the dividend of unlisted shares, which today would give a total taxation of 38.62 percent on divi-dend. This would have significantly increased the neutrality between individual business and close companies, although close companies would still have some advantage at income levels over one million. However, the neutrality between small businesses and unlisted companies at high income levels would have decreased. As a result, a cap could be introduced where dividends over a certain amount are taxed in the same way as dividends from unlisted companies, preferably with a requirement for a certain employment rate to activate this cap. Overall, this option would have increased neutrality by raising the tax rate on capital, thus reducing the resource-allocating effect, although it would not completely remove it. The third option is a proposal to abolish the dual tax system. Although this is the option that would have increased neutrality the most and almost achieved complete neutrality, it is not very likely that this option will be introduced by the legislator, especially as it risks causing capital flight to other countries. In summary, this thesis shows the neutrality shortcomings of today's close company taxation. Although it is difficult to create completely neutral rules, there is a strong incentive for the legislator to review the rules. This review can be aided by a method of comprehensive analysis of micro and macro neutrality as an effective way to actually assess the effect of tax rules on society, and it is therefore desirable for the legislator to more con-tinuously use such a method. In addition, the motivation for the introduc-tion of small business taxation as neutrality rules today is misleading, as the rules rather decrease neutrality than increase it.