rotor said:
Quoted from:
http://www.qt.com.au/news/companies-taxes-revealed/2877018/
"FOUR major Gladstone companies did not pay any income tax in the 2013-2014 financial year; and others that did, paid a smaller percentage of their income than the average worker.
Queensland Alumina Limited, Boyne Smelters, BG-Group operating as QGC, and APLNG are all on the Australian Taxation Office's list, released yesterday, of almost 600 companies that didn't pay tax that year."
But the ATO they didn't miss out getting mine or your tax that year!
In my opinion, any person or company that moves their finances, workforce or profits overseas to reap the tax rewards should be given a one way ticket never to return and that includes Malcolm Turnbull or any other politician/person!
Which of those companies are foreign and which made a profit to be taxed on (a serious question - I don't know)?
"others that did, paid a smaller percentage of their income than the average worker" - surely that has nothing to do with foreign workers or 457 visas but is primarily because the maximum rate of company tax in Australia is significantly less than the maximum rate of personal tax? And this is because all countries get most of their tax from the population, not from companies, because companies are suppliers of employment (plus some comapany tax in the main) and provide jobs for workers (thus saving on welfare and providing income to the government in terms of tax on the population). Whereas the population are consumers of those jobs and government benefits and simply pass on their component of taxation on earnings from the companies. Some countries do not tax companies at all for that reason (which is why Trump is talking about a tiny company tax for the USA).
I still feel that the criticism should be shafted to governments that allow unreasonable things to be done, before selecting companies that operate within the law. I claimed all my deductions last year. If the law is bad, the government should change it. The tax department simply publishing such a list without explanation is just a cop-out, a pretending that they are doing something. I think that we should all be trying to understand how things work (eg should a big foreign company that genuinely made a loss everywhere in the world be forced to pay tax on profits it did not make?) - and asking our local members to get the tax department to explain. I think there is enough to suggest that changes are needed and my understanding is that world governments have got together to discuss how to correct the problem in the future, but I can see that care is needed with new legislation - some countries are putting in large legal claims which suggests that things were not even legal but illegal, so those company actions were presumably an offence not a legal evasion. However if you hit a company that made no profit for a valid reason with a tax, a company that is hanging in there in the expectation that next year will be better (often with good reason), you will close many on the spot and all employees will be out of a job, they may lose some or all accrued benefits, the taxation department will no longer receive tax from the employees, the government will have to pay increased welfare and pension benefits from our tax money....And of course no foreign company in their right mind would invest in any company in Australia again (we don't own most companies, foreigners do and have invested $30 trillion here that we don't have to invest ourselves).
But we need to keep the issue on the boil - someting is wrong and needs re-thinking, but I doubt that any one country can do it, only a unified front of many countries - otherwise companies will simply invest elsewhere not here. In fact, the Australian currency would drop more than 90% overnight if we acted alone - sanctions alone on South Africa and Russia did that for a similar reason - companies immediately stopped or sold investments in those countries and the currency values crashed 94-95% (within days in one case), and major unemployment resulted. In both cases I was living or visiting those countries and lost most of what I had, so I do know what I am talking about (starvation resulted in some places) - we don't want that here. Governments don't have some magical store of funds when things go bottom up - if they aren't getting taxation they cannot supply anything (health, dole, pension) - the only recourse is a loine from the World Bank which would not be given under such circumstances - and even then your currency would double as wall-paper and we could not import what we don't presently make, or continue to make much of what we do make (including grow to eat). Western governments have done better than the 2nd and 3rd world so far, to the extent that our populations just assume that things like starvation cannot happen to them - but I don't want to be a Greek resident right now.
