There’s little evidence that Australian wine makers are dumping their product, so it appears China’s latest threat to slap tariffs on exporters has more to do with diplomatic relations, writes Marcus Reubenstein.
Latest Finance & Tax Stories
Taxes are not a burden: they provide many of the good things in life
Coalition spending over the past six years has been nearly half that of the past 40 years and is forecast to drop further. With many services already cut to the bone, even the Parliamentary Budget Office has warned such ‘spending restraint’ is likely to be unsustainable. In a post-pandemic world, bringing forward tax cuts that only benefit high earners would be irresponsible, writes Michael Keating.
GFC v Corona Crash: why it’s different this time
Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg can kiss their cherished budget surplus goodbye. They never quite got there. Now we await their stimulus package, surely a more decisive affair than the bushfire response.Markets cratered around the world overnight on a 30 per cent...
Super Void: what super funds are telling regulators is not what they are telling customers
Compare the pair. Thulasisi Sivapalan is Australia’s most prolific super fund investor. The PhD researcher from UTS tried to join 41 super funds just to get their financial statements. It was a tough journey; navigating mystified admin people, unhelpful regulators at APRA, even an abattoir. On a mission to find out how much tax super funds pay, Thulasisi discovered hundreds of millions of dollars in discrepancies between what Australia’s super funds were telling their investors and what they were reporting to APRA. Callum Foote reports on a peculiar road-trip.
Great Timing: inside the ASIC investigation into Westpac’s jumbo capital raising
ASIC investigates Westpac’s $2.5 billion capital raising, executed just before AUSTRAC’s lawsuit against the bank for 23 million breaches of money-laundering and terrorism-financing laws
Tanna & Taxation: correcting the Fin Review and Energy Australia
The Australian Financial Review attacked Senator Rex Patrick this week after Patrick attacked Energy Australia chief Catherine Tanna, suggesting she step down from the board of the Reserve Bank for running a company whose tax haven structure helped it pay zero tax on $30 billion of income.
Ranking Australia’s billionaires as taxpayers
Which billionaires pay the most tax, and which pay the least?
Australia’s Top 40 Tax Dodgers 2020: fossil fuels dominate once more
It’s Top 40 Tax Dodgers time and Exxon has topped the charts again. This year, we are announcing all 40 in one go
Investigating Uber: more lawyers than drivers
What he didn’t say was that Uber was in the process of shifting assets from Bermuda to the Netherlands in order to create a US$6.1 billion tax deduction. This is the second in a series of Uber investigations
The Living Dead: Babcock emerges as mystery cinema owner
For two years, the people of of Westborough, Massachusetts, tried to find out who owned their town cinema. They searched high and low. Alas, not even the tenant, Interstate Theater Inc, knew the owner
German dialysis giant’s unhealthy business practices: a bloody disgrace
Some people may think that tax dodging is the domain of large US multinationals, particularly the tech giants, like Google, Apple, Facebook, Netflix and Amazon. A new report by the Sydney-based Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability & Research...
Secrets and Lies: how franking credits stole the tax bonanza
Thanks to franking credits, the $52 billion in tax paid by Australia’s largest corporations is not actually received by the Tax Office
OGNAP: how the Government protects its donors and tax dodgers
Bring out yer dead, bring out yer dead. Tis’ the season to bury the news. Michael West reports on OGNAP. If you don’t know what OGNAP is, or beneficial ownership registers, this story is a must-read.
Trump’s tax cuts two years on: yes, we have a verdict
We now have almost two years of evidence of the impact of the tax cuts signed into law by President Donald Trump in December 2017. The picture is grim. None of the touted benefits has eventuated. Alan Austin reports.
Fleecing Australia: Tax Office data dump shows the usual large culprits paying no tax
The giant foreign corporations who extract the most from Australian soils and seabeds have once again paid the least in tax, dollar for dollar. Michael West reports on the fifth year of transparency data from the Australian Tax Office.
Uppercut: call for violence at Parliamentary Inquiry into accountants
It was hardly the venue for violence, the Joint Parliamentary Inquiry into Regulation of Audit in Australia. The Committee transcripts have now dropped and we can report on an extraordinary day in the history of audit, the day when, finally, there were calls for violence.
The Barangaroo Triangle: inside Westpac’s invisible banking regime
Westpac has been running an invisible banking system, invisible to regulators, where multinational company clients even had their on log-ons and could act like banks themselves
Calls for Reserve Bank as Peoples Bank as farm credit dries up
The banks have virtually stopped lending to farmers, writes cattleman and veteran columnist for The Land newspaper John Carter. As the provision of credit is an essential service, there needs to be a rethink in the role of the Reserve Bank in society and the cherished...
Swerving SWIFT: the story behind Westpac’s money-laundering calamity
Bankrolling pedophiles, facilitating massive money-laundering schemes and terrorist-financing have branded Westpac, deservingly, an instant pariah of the banking world. As regulatory intelligence expert Nathan Lynch reveals here however, Westpac is unlikely to be alone. The story behind the story is industrial scale tax avoidance, the concealing of enormous cross-border payments
Audit Blackout: gatekeepers cuddled while sleeping on the job
Why the secrecy? Most of the Big Four’s audit inspections are blacked out; huge chunks redacted by the corporate regulators. In what other field of society would multiple breaches of the law be tolerated? asks Michael West.
Knapp: Big Four failed Australia for their multinational clients
This submission by Jeffrey Knapp to the current Parliamentary Inquiry into the Regulation of Auditing in Australia documents how the Big 4 audit firms – KPMG, PwC, Deloitte and EY – have undermined Australian auditing and financial reporting practice for multinational clients.
Tender Truncheons: Lendlease concedes Tax Office closes net on retirement village racket
“Outlaw these indulgent and selfish practices that threaten the livelihood of fellow Australians,” declared Scott Morrison last week as the protests raged outside a Melbourne mining conference. Tax avoidance, Lendlease.
Lendlease tax boondoggle bigger than the hole it left in Sydney Football Stadium
Lendlease walked away from its contract to rebuild the Sydney Football Stadium in July, leaving a giant hole in the ground and a state government scrambling to fill the construction void
Oracle and EY: 42 breaches of the Corporations Act and counting
“A dark pit of non-disclosure and secrecy”. A “serial lawbreaker” rewarded with lavish Australian government contracts. Forensic accountant Jeffrey Knapp takes the long-handle tech giant Oracle
House of Cards: is Brookfield the next Babcock & Brown?
Babcock & Brown sank in a sea of debt during the Global Financial Crisis, its $70 billion of assets around the world were soon up for grabs. Its rail business in WA went to the then little known Canadian financier, Brookfield. And Brookfield has made a killing
Oracle and Accenture: big tax dodgers queued for visa privatisation prize
Should the Government award contracts to tax cheating multinationals? The subject is likely to be covered when the Parliamentary Inquiry into the Big Four accounting firms kicks off late this year, the Big Four themselves being the ringmasters of global tax chicanery
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