Legal history of income tax in the United States adopted an income tax modeled on the tax instituted in England. The British theory was that you tax the income from property, and not the property itself; thus, sales of property were not subject to taxation. In order to help pay for its war effort in the American Civil War, the United States government imposed its first personal income tax, on August 5, 1861, as part of the Revenue Act of 1861. Tax rates were 3% on income exceeding $600 and less than $10,000, and 5% on income exceeding $10,000. This tax was repealed and replaced by another income tax
Working Party on the Reorganisation of the Income Tax Act 1976 Following on from these reports the government in 1995 established a review process for rewriting the income tax legislation, overseen by an advisory panel drawn from the private and public sectors. The Income Tax Act has since been largely rewritten in a plain English style with a radically re-organised structure, including a unique (for New Zealand) alpha-numeric section referencing system (as opposed to the more usual numeric system. It was re-enacted as the Income Tax Act 1994 and again as the Income Tax Act 2007 as the various parts of the legislation was progressively rewritten. The Rewrite Advisory Panel was