Corporate Tax Dodgers- The battle is not over yet GET=UP

Dear NEVILLE,

Now the G20’s done and dusted, we want to take a little time to celebrate clear progress on the crackdown on corporate tax dodging.

After your concerted pressure on the government, from petitioning the Treasurer to contacting your MPs, writing letters to the editor and calling talkback radio, corporate tax was a big-ticket item during the G20! This is crucial, since increased international cooperation is a major part of what’s needed to effectively crack down on corporate tax dodging.

Here’s what happened:

• In their “communiqué”, G20 leaders promised they are now all “taking actions to ensure the fairness of the international tax system and to secure countries’ revenue bases.”¹

• They committed to making sure countries receive tax from profits made within them through improved reporting. That sounds obvious, but many top companies, like IKEA and Macquarie Group, are paying minimal tax on billions made here in Australia.

• In a few years, G20 countries, including Australia, will have automatic access to other countries’ tax information. It’ll make identifying and clamping down on corporate tax dodgers that much easier.

These are big breakthroughs! But the fact remains that our corporate tax watchdog, the Australian Taxation Office, has had its budget slashed and its staff pushed out the door. Its audit team has dwindled in size and internally people at the ATO are questioning how they can really ‘crack down’ to recover the billions lost from corporate tax avoidance while their organisation is being gutted.²

And despite the good news at the G20, there are a lot of things the Treasurer could be doing right this minute in line with international action plans to crush corporate tax dodging. For example, there was a whole raft of corporate tax loopholes the Government kept open last year — costing Australia $1 billion dollars.³ And the Treasurer’s still not closing any of them.

It’s easy for the Government to point at their fancy 3-page G20 document and claim they’ve done their job on corporate tax. That simply isn’t true, and we need to let the rest of the country know. Can you share our petition calling on our Treasurer to do more on corporate tax dodging? http://getup.org.au/corporate-tax-share

Despite the fact that we’re losing billions in tax revenue from the top 200 ASX companies each year (over half of them have subsidiaries in offshore tax havens), the Government’s still refusing to support a Senate Inquiry into the extent of corporate tax avoidance in Australia.⁴

Right now, 46,000 people have signed onto this petition — but if we can reach another 4000 people, we’ll have a whopping 50,000 signatures. And in the next year, we’ll need all the help we can get to make sure the Government’s undertakings at the G20 lead to genuine reform at home.

The double standard is obvious. The least well off Australians are being asked to shoulder the biggest burden from our Budget, and are being humiliated in the process – as the Government tries to remove income support for unemployed people and hits the sick with a GP co-payment. This is happening as the wealthiest companies systemically avoid paying their fair share, while the Government does little to stop it.

With the Senate Inquiry ramping up in the next few months, we need to grow this movement and get the message out that corporate tax dodging is costing our country billions of dollars, and companies are still getting off scot-free.

Can you spread the word about this campaign and share this petition with your friends and family?

Thanks for all that you do,
Lily, Mark, Nat and Georgina, for the GetUp team

P.S. If you want learn more about the Government’s gross double standard when it comes to corporate tax, have a read of this excellent article in The Monthly: www.themonthly.com.au/issue/2014/november/1414760400/richard-cooke/much-obliged

References:
[1] G20 Leaders’ Communiqué, Brisbane Summit, 15-16 November 2014.
[2] ‘Audit team checking tax payments by multinational companies hard hit by department job cuts’, Sydney Morning Herald, 24 October 2014; ‘Why the ATO is losing the battle against the ‘transnationals”, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 September 2014.
[3] ‘Australia’s stance on tax avoidance out of step, says Bill Shorten’, Sydney Morning Herald, 2 November 2014.
[4] ‘Senate targets corporate tax avoidance’, The Australian, 3 October 2014.