Quote:
Originally Posted by Eratosthenes
pity large corporations dont pay much tax in this country.
in the last financial year, the ATO reported that 40% of Australias largest corporations didnt pay any tax at all. The remaining 60% of corporations paid on average less than 18%.
The Ebay market alone is in excess of several billion dollars per year. A 10% GST tax is a very substantial amount of revenue for the Government.
By the way, our so called Australian Mining and Energy industry is 83% foreign owned (mainly in the hands of US corporations who control about 55% of this sector). This industry pays very little tax on revenue/profits in this country (and only employs about 3% of Australians which is less than the workforce in the Queensland tourism industry)
Naughty BHP for example is being dragged by the government to the Federal court to recoup lost tax revenue due to a very under handed tax avoidance scheme that BHP has been running out of Singapore.
Apparently BHP (Australia) would on sell resources well below market price to an intermediate set up in Singapore, who would then on sell the resource to the final destination at global market prices. All this, to avoid paying tax in Australia.
And remember, the mining and energy sectors in Australia are subsidised by the Australian Tax payer to the tune of 12 billion dollars per year.
We seem to do things in a very smart way in this country.  |
Most of this is the line being peddled by Fairfax, the ABC and Crikey.
Most of the tax stuff has been attacked and demonstrated to be wrong by Terry McCrann in his columns.
And, as he points out, Fairfax's main financial paper, the Australian Financial Review is probably very embarrassed by the tripe being put out by its sister papers. The AFR isn't publishing the "We are being ripped off by companies" nonsense, because they know it's nonsense.
The notion that the most feared organisation in the country - the ATO - just lets companies pay little of no tax, is ridiculous.
As Treasurer Hockey recently said, the companies are paying 30cents tax in the dollar on every single dollar that they are required to do so.
McCrann pointed out that the conspiracy articles were
a. confusing accrual accounting profits in the company reports, with the actual profits they had to pay tax on,
b. that they were confusing Trusts with companies, where the trusts pay no company tax, but the trust owners were paying tax at the full personal rate,
c. that they were confusing overseas earnings with local earnings, where, for example their analysis suggested that Newscorp should be paying Australian company tax on all its profits, when in fact most of that profit is made overseas, where they pay tax in the overseas countries.
Regards,
Renato