En Passant

The Prime Minister is not any ordinary taxpayer. Malcolm Turnbull should make all the information about his Cayman Islands’ arrangement public so we can judge whether he is avoiding any Australian tax or taking advantage of special rules that reduce or exempt his income from Australian tax. His government should also withdraw its attempts to shield information about the (likely very small) amount of Australian income tax the private companies of the likes of Gina Rinehart and James Packer pay.

No doubt all those companies in Vanuatu (especially those with some sort of Australian connection) which have benefited from not paying any income tax there and perhaps reducing their Australian and other country tax will be chipping in lots to help the country after the catastrophic Cyclone Pam destroyed a number of lives and livelihoods. Oh …

The one percent has captured not only Parliament and tax policy but tax administration now too. If that is true, the conclusion we might then reach is that the slaughter of Tax Office jobs currently under way is actually an attempt to administratively reduce taxes on capital by weakening the capacity of the ATO to tax the rich and powerful. Certainly that fits in neatly with the neoliberal cut taxes mantra of most politicians and the Treasury.

Over to you Commissioner of Taxation.

Me quoted by Georgia Wilkins in The Age (and other Fairfax publications) today. John Passant, from the school of political science and international relations, at the Australian National University, said the trend noted by Computershare was further evidence multinationals did not take global regulators seriously. ”US companies are doing this on the hard-nosed basis that […]

Company tax avoidance is not a failing of capitalism: it is its logical expression.
There are two ways to really tax the rich. The first is for workers to win bigger pay increases to stop the bosses getting their hands on more of our money before they can play funny buggers with it. The second is to overthrow the capitalist system which produces corporate tax avoidance.

As a tax man I have been thinking about Kevin Rudd’s idea to cut company tax in the Northern Territory to 20%.

Let me tell you a story about profit shifting, or transfer pricing as it is known in tax circles.

If the UK Public Accounts Committee can question Starbucks, Amazon and Google about their tax affairs, and then condemn them for not paying any tax in Britain, we can do it here in Australia.

A thoroughgoing investigation into the tax affairs of big business is needed to see just what they get up to and whether they are paying a fair share of tax in Australia. After all, what has big business got to hide? Over to you Senators Rhiannon and Cameron.

Without a mass working class movement demanding and winning better wages, more jobs and price controls as well as more tax paid by the rich and big business, the rich and big business will continue to get richer and pay less and less tax.

There are 2 important aspects of tax havens – low or no tax and bank secrecy. Henry is about less imposition by the state on the other hostile brothers and in keeping the accumulation process which creates surplus value ticking over and running smoothly it has to reduce its taxes on capital to do so. This is the logic of tax competition – and tax havens are its ultimate expression.

Between $21 and $32 trillion – as much as Japan and America’s GDPs combined – has been stashed in offshore tax havens by the world’s richest 10 million individuals. Just 92,000 of them claim a $9.8 trillion dollar share.