Syazana Safiah Binti Rozman

On the court record

Grounded in income-tax law — the taxability of receipts, group relief under section 44A, and the revenue's powers to obtain third-party information under the Income Tax Act 1967 and the Personal Data Protection Act 2010.

Syazana Safiah Binti Rozman's appearances in this corpus are in revenue law, arising from appeals in the Court of Appeal (Mahkamah Rayuan) concerning the assessment and collection of income tax. In one matter she acted as counsel for the respondent in an appeal against a decision affirming the Special Commissioners of Income Tax, where loan debts that had been waived during the relevant year of assessment were treated as taxable income. The taxpayer's complaint was that it had already been fully taxed on the loan amount, having been unable to deduct the loan debt as a deductible expense, so that treating the waiver as taxable income produced an unfair result. The appeal therefore engaged the characterisation of a debt waiver for income-tax purposes and the boundary between capital and income receipts.

In a second matter she acted as counsel for the appellant — the Director General of Inland Revenue — in an appeal concerning the meaning of an "irrevocable election" under section 44A(2)(a)(iv) of the Income Tax Act 1967. The question was whether the irrevocable election permits a revision of the adjusted loss that has been surrendered and claimed between more than one claimant company, where the total adjusted loss remains the same, and whether the requirements of section 44A — in particular subsections (2), (5) and (6) — had been fulfilled, in the context of group relief.

She also acted for the appellant, the Director General of Inland Revenue, in a judicial-review matter seeking an order of prohibition under Order 53 of the Rules of Court 2012, at the intersection of tax administration and data protection. The issue was the disclosure of customers' information for the assessment or recovery of tax, and how section 39(b)(ii) of the Personal Data Protection Act 2010 and section 81 of the Income Tax Act 1967 interact where the revenue seeks third-party information. Across these matters, Syazana Safiah Binti Rozman's practice is grounded in income-tax law — the taxability of receipts, group relief and the powers of the revenue to obtain information.