Time to make ’em pay!

tax the rich

‘The big bludgers are the corporate tax dodgers’

The first step to fix corporate tax dodging is to expose who pays and who doesn’t pay their fair share. To that end, Michael West Media (MWM) is launching  TAXDATA, a resource which allows anyone to see which companies are paying tax and which are not and contains data on thousands of companies, including their revenue, profit, and tax payments over the last eleven years. The resource, hosted by MWM, has been developed as a collaboration with the University of Technology Sydney (UTS), CICTAR and the Tax Justice Network Australia.

In an article accompanying the launch, CICTAR’s Principal Analyst, Jason Ward explains the importance of Australia’s world-leading (if still not perfect) tax transparency regime and calls for further reform:

‘Most rational Australians want the government to spend more on essential public services…and 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. The first step is always transparency and 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’.

As a result of previous steps forward on transparency, there are already 11 years (FY2014-24) of corporate tax data on the largest corporations operating in Australia, availble from the Australia Tax Office (ATO). This is underutilised information and does not yet exist in many countries’.

Thanks to the collaborative effort, and support from the CPSU-PSU and CPSU-SPSF unions, the ATO data is now available via easy, searchable drop down menus. In the article, Ward provides some intriguing examples, of specific company data, to give a taste of what the resource can provide.