The Tax Justice Network has had a massive impact on tax and political debate in Australia largely due to the tireless efforts of Mark Zirnsak. The latest coup is reported in the Sydney Morning Herald:
Out of 1539 of Australia's largest corporate entities, 38 per cent did not pay any tax in 2013-14.
Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan has released the tax details of corporate entities with $100 million or more annual turnover — 985 of which are foreign-owned, and 554 of which are Australian foreign entities.
There is much to note in that article. But what is significant is the fact that the data has been published, with names attached.
It's time we did the same here in the UK.
First that would be a step to verifying country-by-country reporting data.
Second it would force more companies to explain their tax better.
Third, we might see better accounting as encouraged by the Fair Tax Mark.
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Interesting. The data is available from the links here – https://www.ato.gov.au/Media-centre/Media-releases/Corporate-tax-transparency-data/
As the Commissioner of Taxation himself said – https://www.ato.gov.au/Media-centre/Media-releases/Statement-by-Commissioner-of-Taxation,-Chris-Jordan-AO-on-corporate-tax-transparency/ –
“Collectively, these 1500 large corporates paid almost $40 billion in company tax in the 2014 fiscal year.
No tax paid does not necessarily mean tax avoidance. Any companies with unusual financial or taxation numbers are closely investigated by the ATO. Over half of these 1500 companies have been subject to ATO review or audit over the past three years … we raise additional assessments of about $2 billion each year through our compliance action on this group of companies.”
That suggests that about 95% of corporate income taxes are being paid by these companies as they should.
As the SMH article reports, the total taxable income for these 1,500 companies is be about A$170 billion from gross revenues of around A$1.6 trillion. Around a third appear to be paying no corporate income tax because they have no net taxable income. For example, QANTAS appears to have zero taxable income from total income of nearly A$15 billion. No doubt it has current period and carried forward losses, or other tax deductible expenditure.
I was calling for the transparency
I did not draw inference
The Tory and Labour backers would hate to see their company pals firms listed like that. But it needs to be done and now!
It’s time we did the same here in the UK.
Absolutely right!
I like Kelly O’Dwyer’s (the Aussie Assistant Treasurer) comment “…just because some entities haven’t paid tax doesn’t mean they are avoiding their tax obligations.”
There’s lots of entities which like making losses in Australia? I don’t think so.
This must be a big problem for the neo-libs. On the one hand people, like Ms O’Dwyer are always telling us that we have to be able to collect these taxes to be able to fund social spending, no matter that inflation is only 0%, but it’s obvious from the excuses they make for corporate criminals that they aren’t serious about collecting those taxes anyway.