They in fact got a refund despite charging more than 20% for credit and high membership fees and charging merchant high fees yet pay no taxes for 7 years? Who in ATO has fallen asleep at the wheels?
Even centre link small modest payments for really poor people is taxed yet American Express pay no tax???
http://m.smh.com.au/business/the-economy/american-express-pa…
The main issue for me is the global corporations still charge the "Australia" tax, and repatriate their profits to avoid tax.
We need a global agreement on this.
Unfortunately that's the problem of globalisation.
Why pay 30% of profit to Australian government, when you can shift that as a "license fee" to your parent company in some obscure tax haven that has 2% company tax? We are getting paid by various international companies and often they are paid from Singapore or Ireland although they have Australian presence…
Not sure what the AU government can do though as they aren't really doing anything "illegal". You can gear up ATO and tighten up legislations, but the big globals are just going to hire more superstar accountants :(
In other jurisdictions taxes sometimes have a minimum. So if you have revenues of $100million you might pay a minimum of 10% tax, even if you had losses that caused deductions meaning you owed less. The deductions could be carried forward to offset income in subsequent years to protect a legit business just having a bad year, but it would prevent at least some of these multi-nationals that make a loss year in, year out for tax purposes.
I think this was the reasoning behind the US alternative minimum tax:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alternative_minimum_tax#History
If the organisation isnt incorporated in Australia, my guess is they all minimize or pay no tax. Transfer pricing (act of parent saying to aust operations, u pay me this just to be alive) is so subjective it's impossible to police. And so easy to reduce tax bill to almost zero. See Ikea, aldi, etc. I dare say, a lot of the fast fashion retialers would be doing the same given the designers of the clothing is based not in Australia, so the cost of clothing could be inflated to reduce profits.
But hey, we love international brands, nearly everyone I know goes to Ikea for cheap stuff. Sigh, world we live in.
Not ethical, but appears to be absolutely legal. We (individuals) always try to reduce our income tax payable within the legal boundaries, so do the corporations. It's just they can shift profits to the other countries and we can't.
Yet again, if the companies are shifting profits to the other countries, than maybe the local corporate tax rate is too high. Otherwise introduce legislation that will directly prohibit doing that. But then don't complain about the lack of competition or paying "australian tax".