Time to make ’em pay! The big bludgers are the corporate tax dodgers

The first step to fixing corporate tax evasion is to reveal who is paying and who is not paying their fair share. To this end, MWM starting up TAX DATA. Jason Ward explains.

Eleven years of data. Now you can find out who are Australia’s ‘lifters’ and who are ‘underdogs’ with the click of a button or two. Tech bros, fossil fuel exporters, banks and real estate giants; you name it.

TAXDATA is a collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), CICTAR and the Australian Tax Justice Network. It contains data for thousands of companies, including their revenues, profits and tax payments over the last eleven years.

Since we’re not that far away from a federal budget, the usual complaints will be about increases in government spending. But most rational Australians want the government to spend more on essential public services, not less.

People want better public roads and infrastructure,

quality aged care and child care, schools and hospitals. How about expanding Medicare to include dentistry?

All of this would be possible if the largest companies were made to pay their debts rather than evade responsibility. This is largely a matter of political will. Australia must continue to show global leadership on multinational tax reforms and close loopholes that allow profits from our resources and expenditure in Australia to be shifted offshore.

Tax transparency of multinational companies

Australia led the way in promoting the world’s best multinational tax transparency legislation. When this data begins to be made public in a few months, it will reveal multinational tax evasion even more clearly.

Multinational companies with at least $10 million in Australian revenue will be required to publicly disclose more tax-related data in Australia, as well as in 40 tax havens around the world, including Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong.

For the first time, anyone anywhere in the world will be able to see which giant corporations are shifting their profits to where, and which taxes are being paid (or not paid) and where. Transparency will encourage changes in corporate behavior, allow for exemptions from public contracts and make closing loopholes in legislation much easier.

The first step is transparency. There are currently 11 years (Financial Year 2014-24) of corporate tax data available for the largest companies operating in Australia. This is underutilized information and is not yet available in many countries. This ATO data is now consolidated into easy, searchable drop-down menus.

Some interesting examples will be given MWM readers a taste.

Intercity

Nobody likes paying tolls, especially in Sydney, which has the highest toll in the world. Over the last 11 years, Transurban Holdings has generated an average of over $2.5 billion in annual revenue, reported an average annual profit of $66.6 million, and paid ZERO corporate taxes. It is structured as a trust, and although the stakeholders must pay tax, they do so at their marginal rate, so usually half the corporation tax rate.

Sydney Airport

Serving a limited audience with retail space, surcharges and parking fees, Sydney Airport Corporation has paid ZERO corporate income tax for the last 11 years and averaged over $1 billion in annual revenue.

Sydney Airport had zero taxable income for the entire period and was privatized in 2024, meaning the final year accounted for $0 in total income. Again, trust.

DP World

The world’s 5th largest global port operator, whose CEO Dubai Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem was forced to resign due to his deep ties to Trump friend and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, is a particular case.

DP World managed to go a full decade with ZERO corporate tax payments, but ended up deferring its first tax payment in 2024. DP World may be up to some new tricks now (stay tuned).

Strip

On the positive side, the US oil giant, once dubbed Australia’s biggest tax evader, was set to become the 4th largest corporate taxpayer in 2024. Estimated profit margin reached almost 61% on revenue of $19.4 billion.

But Chevron paid ZERO corporate taxes from 2014 until its first payment of $30 (yes, thirty dollars) in 2021. Chevron now pays more tax in Australia than in the US or any other country in the world.

Some of these can be explained by covering large investment costs. The broader explanation includes the massive public exposure of Chevron’s tax evasion, the ATO’s landmark court decision against Chevron in 2017, other tax reforms and regulations in Australia, and ATO sanctions specifically focused on the oil and gas industry.

Guess who’s responsible for cleaning up gas giant Chevron?

Petroleum Resource Rental Tax (PRRT)

If Australians wanted a little extra income to fund hospitals and schools (and maybe some gas to support local industry and lower prices for consumers), we might want to charge Chevron and all the other global oil and gas giants for the huge amounts of gas extracted from Commonwealth waters.

Australia continues to give away offshore gas resources for free due to breaches of the Petroleum Resources Rent Tax (PRRT). The last Liberal and current Labor governments have tried to fix things but have fundamentally failed to solve the problem. The ATO’s public data shows that by 2024 Chevron and others are paying ZERO in PRRT.

As LNG and oil prices rise along with corporate profits in the wake of Israeli-American attacks on Iran and the escalating crisis in the Middle East, it may be time to take a fresh look at Australia’s resource tax and royalty regimes.

Huge and highly profitable US multinationals rank high among Australia’s most aggressive tax evaders. Under pressure from Trump, fellow former Australian finance minister Mathias Corman, as OECD Secretary-General, exempted US companies (Pillar 2) from the trialled global minimum tax.

Trump also killed the OECD’s initiative (Pillar 1) to tax the world’s largest and most profitable multinationals, especially major US technology companies. Aggressive tax evasion has been given a new tax shelter and shield as Trump attempts to run a protection racket for his Big Tech Bro friends. Australia should reconsider the Digital Services Tax (DST) or other measures to ensure a fair contribution to funding our future.

Screaming for reform

The previous examples and many more relate to institutional misuse of trust structures in Australia. Where did the earnings go? Was the tax paid (or not) elsewhere? Does anyone trust the reforms?

Legislation to stop the misuse of offshore royalty payments for intellectual property (IP) could also be an effective approach to generating more tax revenue. This nifty little trick is costing Australia billions of dollars in lost income that could help boost JobSeeker payments, for example.

The ATO’s recent losses in high court cases involving intellectual property/copyright abuses Pepsi And Seer (Australian subsidiaries are not yet included in the data but will be added soon) make it clear that new legislation is required.

Larry Ellison is the founder and largest shareholder of Oracle and a friend of Trump. A surge in AI stocks has temporarily pushed him above Elon Musk as the world’s richest billionaire. In the case filed against Oracle, the ATO requested the court to hear the case urgently, as the case set a precedent for 15 other companies.

Technology giants do not pay their shares

Other technology giants also fall quite short. Apple It was among the 30 largest companies in Australia with revenues of $12.4 billion in 2024. But corporate income tax payments were less than $154 million. Apple’s profit margin in Australia averaged less than 4.6% over the 11-year period; this was a tiny fraction of the global margin.

Could this be an indication that royalty payments to Ireland have artificially reduced reported profits in Australia? Previous research has shown exactly how Microsoft, Oracle, Accenture and Amazon have shifted profits from Australia, mostly to Ireland.

MicrosoftMicrosoft’s revenues in Australia have grown steadily every year since 2014. It paid just under $162 million in taxes in 2024. Australia’s profit margin was less than 7%; This was just a fraction of global profit levels of around 36%.

AccentureThe company that has been awarded more in (problematic) federal contracts in recent years than any of the Big 4 auditing and consulting firms deserves mention. Although Accenture is a US company, it was founded in Ireland. It generated an average of $2.2 billion in Australian revenue over the last 11 years but paid an average annual corporate tax of just $39 million.

Why was the BOM website so expensive? | West Report

Why does the government continue to reward these tax-evading multinationals with huge government contracts?

Being a good (tax) citizen

As a positive result, Fortescue becomes Australia’s third largest corporate taxpayer in 2024, behind BHP and Rio Tinto.

Major Australian banks also top the list of revenues, profits and taxes paid in Australia, unlike some of their international rivals. Fortescue paid over $3.9 billion in taxes in 2024, with an average annual tax payment of approximately $2.2 billion over 11 years and an average profit margin of around 38%.

TAX DATA, aka. The Infotax.Media disclosure data center (www.infotax.media) brings together 11 years of publicly disclosed ATO corporation tax data, starting in 2014, for research and analysis purposes. Created in collaboration with Associate Professor Roman Lanis (UTS), Dr Mikhail Shashnov (UTS) and Jason Ward (CICTAR).

It currently includes ATO Tax Transparency data for 1274 unique private and public companies for the years 2014-2024. Current ATO data includes information on total income (revenue), taxable income and tax payable for all companies with annual revenue of more than $100 million. TAXDATA is a living platform. It will be updated from the ATO Tax Transparency database and other ATO disclosures and will be updated when the ATO publishes new data.

Please review and reference the website if it is used in publishable research. Comments and suggestions to improve or improve the data are welcomed.

Corporate tax avoidance. Who helps finance Australia and who doesn’t?