Nick G.
The former Business Council of Australia (BCA) president Tony Shepherd’s Audit Commission revealed the agenda that local and foreign corporations are pursuing through the Abbott Government.
Through a manufactured “budget crisis” they are putting the squeeze on working Australians.
The same BCA knows very well that its corporate membership is engaging in massive tax avoidance.
Towards the end of last month they co-hosted with legal firm Clayton Utz a seminar on the OECD and G20 decision to try and restrict base erosion and profit shifting loopholes that have scandalised Europe with revelations that giants like Amazon Books and Google have paid next to nothing on huge profits in countries like the UK.
The seminar was told by Tax Office officials that 233 multinationals in Australia were “under review” and had collectively sent around $60 billion to related parties in tax havens outside this country in 2012.
That money, if taxed at the company tax rate in Australia, would provide revenue to the government that would allow it to fund social programs rather than cut them.
One of the mechanisms for avoiding tax on these billions of dollars was for a company to register a trading hub in a tax haven, transfer to it the Australian company’s intellectual property rights, and then have the hub “charge” the Australian company for use of those rights.
Massive untaxed profits, exit stage right.
Reports from the seminar suggest that rather than chastising themselves for this dishonesty, business participants sought assurances that sections of the transfer-pricing legislation introduced by the Labor government when it held office would not be used to try to recover these untaxed profits.
The Deputy Tax Commissioner Mark Konza assured business that the tax commissioner would not “go crazy with this power”. In fact, he said, the powers would be “rarely implemented” because of associated legal difficulties.
Big business was further assured that Abbott’s decision to slash 3000 jobs at the Tax Office would probably hamper what little effort the ATO may have been planning to put into the task.
At around the same time, it was revealed that the number of superannuation clients with funds of more than $5 million had increased by 76 percent in the past three years, and those with over $10 million in super had doubled, reflecting the increasing numbers of super-rich living off our work.
Given the tax breaks and concessions associated with super funds, the super-rich are able to receive income (returns on investments made with their money by super funds) on which they pay zero to 15 percent tax, instead of the current top rate of 46.5 percent.
These disclosures prove once again that there is no basis for budget “crisis” warnings.
The problem is not that there is insufficient money in this country to provide for the government’s revenue.
The problem is that there is too much, and it’s in the hands of corporations and individuals who can use profit-shifting and superannuation to laugh at the rest of us mug taxpayers.
These social parasites are past their use-by date.
Their unfairness and arrogance are intolerable.
We can and
will intensify our efforts to get rid of them.
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Further reading: Westfield pays less than 8 cents in the dollar, cheating the tax office of $2.6 billion. See:
Abbott's latest tax changes only make corporate tax avoidance easier:
http://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/politics/2014/06/07/the-buried-treasures-corporate-tax-avoidance/1402063200#.U5O4RCo3zKo
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