The first step to fix corporate tax dodging is to expose who pays and who doesn’t pay their fair share. To that end, MWM is launching TAXDATA. Jason Ward explains.
Eleven years of data. With a keystroke or two you can now find out who are Australia’s ‘lifters’ and who are the ‘leaners’. Tech bros, fossil fuel exporters, banks and property giants; you name it.
TAXDATA is a collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), CICTAR and the Tax Justice Network Australia. It contains data on thousands of companies, including their revenue, profit, and tax payments over the last eleven years.
With the federal budget not far away, 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 childcare, schools and hospitals. How about an expansion of Medicare to include dental?
All of this is possible if the biggest corporations are made to pay what is owed rather than shirking responsibility. It is largely a question of political will. Australia must continue to show global leadership in multinational tax reforms and close loopholes allowing profits earned in Australia, from our resources and our spending, to be shifted offshore.
Tax transparency of multinationals
Australia has led the way in introducing the world’s best multinational tax transparency legislation. When that data begins to be made public in a few months, it will expose multinational tax dodging in an even clearer way.
Multinational corporations with at least $10 million in Australian revenue will be required to publicly disclose more tax-related data in Australia, but also in 40 tax havens around the world, including Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong.
Anyone anywhere will be able to see, for the first time, which corporate giants shifted profits where paid and what taxes were paid (or not) where. Transparency will encourage changes in corporate behaviour, could allow exclusions from public contracts, and make it much easier to close loopholes through legislation.
The first step is transparency. There are already 11 years (FY2014-24) of corporate tax data on the largest corporations operating in Australia. This is an underutilised piece of information and does not yet exist in many countries. This ATO data has now been combined into easy, searchable drop-down menus.
Some intriguing examples will give MWM readers a taste.
Transurban
No one likes to pay tolls, especially in Sydney, with the highest tolls in the world. Over the last 11 years, Transurban Holdings has averaged over $2.5B in revenue per year, reported average annual profits of $66.6 million and paid ZERO in corporate income tax. It is structured as a trust, and while it is the stakeholders have to pay tax they do so at their marginal rates – ergo, often half the corporate tax rate.
Sydney Airport
With its retail expanse, surcharges and parking fees catering to a captive audience, over the last 11 years, Sydney Airport Corporation also paid ZERO in corporate income tax while generating average annual revenues of over $1B.
Sydney Airport had zero taxable income over the whole period and was taken private in 2024, explaining the $0 total income for the most recent year. Again, a trust.
DP World
The world’s 5th largest global port operator, whose CEO, Dubai’s Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, was just forced to resign due to his deep ties to Trump’s friend and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, is a special case.
DP World managed to go a full decade with ZERO corporate tax payments, but finally coughed up its first tax payment in 2024. DP World might be up to some new tricks now (stay tuned).
Chevron
On the positive side, the US oil giant, once labelled Australia’s largest tax dodger, was the 4th largest corporate taxpayer in 2024. It’s estimated profit margin nearly hit 61% on $19.4B in revenue.
However, Chevron paid ZERO corporate income tax from 2014 until its first payment of $30 in 2021 (yep, thirty dollars). Chevron now pays more tax in Australia than in the US or any other country in the world.
Some of this can be explained by recouping huge investment costs. A broader explanation includes the major public exposure of Chevron’s tax dodging, the ATO’s landmark court ruling against Chevron in 2017, further Australian tax reforms and regulations, and ATO enforcement specifically focused on the oil and gas industry.
Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT)
If Australians wanted a little extra revenue to fund hospitals and schools (and maybe a little bit of gas to support local industry and bring down prices for consumers), we might want to charge Chevron – and all the other global oil and gas giants – for the vast amounts of gas extracted from Commonwealth waters.
Australia continues to give away its offshore gas resources for free because of a broken Petroleum Resource Rent Tax (PRRT). The last Liberal and current Labor governments have tinkered around the edges but fundamentally have failed to fix the problem. The ATO’s public data shows that through 2024, Chevron and others have paid ZERO in PRRT.
As LNG and oil prices spike along with corporate profits in the wake of Israeli-American attacks on Iran and an escalating crisis in the Middle East, it might be time to take a fresh look at Australia’s resource tax and royalty regimes.
Giant – and highly profitable – US multinational corporations rank high among Australia’s most aggressive tax dodgers. Under pressure from Trump, old Australian finance minister friend Mathias Corman, as Secretary General of the OECD, exempted US corporations from the attempted (Pillar 2) global minimum tax.
Trump also killed the OECD’s attempt (Pillar 1) at taxing the largest and most profitable multinationals in the world, particularly US Big Tech. With Trump attempting to run a protection racket for his Big Tech Bro friends, aggressive tax dodging has been given a new tax shelter and shield. Australia must reconsider a Digital Service Tax (DST) or other measures to guarantee a fair contribution to fund our future.
Crying out for reform
The earlier examples, and many others, have to do with the corporate abuse of trust structures in Australia. Where did the profits go? Was tax paid somewhere else (or not)? Trust reforms, anyone?
Legislation to stop the abuse of offshore royalty payments for intellectual property (IP) could also be an effective approach to raise more tax revenue. This nifty little trick loses Australia billions in revenue that might, for example, help raise JobSeeker payments.
The recent losses by the ATO on high court cases involving IP/royalty abuses against Pepsi and Oracle (Australian subsidiaries not yet in the data but to be added soon), make it clear that new legislation is required.
Larry Ellison is the founder of Oracle, its largest shareholder and a friend of Trump. With an AI share surge, he temporarily rose above Elon Musk as the world’s richest billionaire. In the case against Oracle, the ATO pleaded with the court to hear the case urgently as it was a precedent for 15 other corporations.
Tech giants not paying their share
Other tech giants also fall well short. Apple ranked in the top 30 corporations in Australia in 2024 with $12.4B in revenue. However, the corporate income tax payments were less than $154 million. Apple’s Australian profit margin averaged below 4.6%, a fraction of its global margin, for the 11-year period.
Might this be an indication that royalty payments made to Ireland artificially reduce reported profits in Australia? Previous research has shown exactly how Microsoft, Oracle, Accenture and Amazon have shifted profits from Australia, mostly to Ireland.
Microsoft, coming in at the 50th largest corporation in Australia with revenue of over $8B in 2024. Microsoft’s Australian revenues have risen steadily every year since 2014. It paid under $162m in tax in 2024. The Australian profit margin was under 7%, just a fraction of the nearly 36% global profit levels.
Accenture, which in recent years was awarded more in (troubled) federal contracts than any of the Big 4 audit and consultancy firms, needs a mention. Although a US company, Accenture is incorporated in Ireland. Over the last 11 years, it has averaged a solid $2.2B in Australian revenues but paid only $39 million in average annual corporate income tax.
Why does the Government continue to reward these tax-dodging multinational corporations with huge government contracts?
Being a good (tax) citizen
To end on a positive note, Fortescue – following BHP and Rio Tinto – was the third largest Australian corporate taxpayer in 2024.
The big Australian banks, unlike some of their international competitors, are also at the top of the list of revenues, profits and taxes paid in Australia. Fortescue paid over $3.9B in tax in 2024, averaged annual tax payments of nearly $2.2B over the 11 years, and had profit margins averaging nearly 38%.
TAXDATA, aka. Infotax.Media disclosure datahub (www.infotax.media), collates 11 years of publicly disclosed ATO corporate income tax data beginning in 2014 for research and analysis purposes. It was created in collaboration with Associate Professor Roman Lanis (UTS), Dr Mikhail Shashnov (UTS) and Jason Ward (CICTAR).
Currently, it contains the ATO Tax Transparency data for the years 2014-2024 for 1274 unique private and public companies. The current ATO data includes information on total income (revenue), taxable income and tax payable for all companies with more than $100 million in annual revenue. 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 releases new data.
Please peruse and reference the website if used in publishable research. Comments and suggestions are welcome to improve or enhance the data.
Corporate tax avoidance. Who helps fund Australia, and who doesn’t?
Jason Ward is Principal Analyst at the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability & Research (CICTAR). Ward has been a frequent commentator on corporate tax issues as an analyst and spokesperson for the Tax Justice Network – Australia (TJN-Aus). He is currently a Visiting Fellow at the Business School at the University of Greenwich and a PhD student in accounting at the University of Technology Sydney.