Dear Pfizer,
Please go to the Australian Tax Office and strike a settlement for your billion-dollar “magic pudding”. The tax avoided is around $60 million, as you and your colleagues from KPMG know.
michaelwest.com.au also calls on your auditor and tax adviser KPMG to surrender the millions in tax fees and audit fees it has reaped from Pfizer since 2011 when these sham structures were put in place. Give it to charity and apologise. You have the opportunity to lead the corporate world by example, to act with integrity.
We also call on Pfizer and KPMG to pay michaelwest.com.au the $800 in search fees which it cost to identify their devious tax avoidance scheme – money paid to the Australian Securities & Investments Commission (ASIC) for this “public information”, involving some 23 documents in all.
Pfizer and KPMG enjoy a privileged position in society; Pfizer has has been gifted billions of dollars in taxpayer subsidies via the Pharmaceutical Benefits Scheme (PBS). While successive Australian governments have respected your intellectual property, your patent protections, you and other pharma companies have been cynically transferring wealth from their citizens by avoiding tax.
By transfer pricing, and thereby deliberately reducing its profit base in Australia, Pfizer has paid barely two per cent tax on $15 billion in revenues over the past ten years.
For its part, KPMG has enjoyed first place among the Big Four global accounting firms in winning government mandates for advice work. It has earned at least $934 million over ten years for writing reports, paper shuffling.
Pfizer and KPMG are by no means alone among their multinational and Big Four audit peers when it comes to cheating the Australian public on tax while winning government mandates for giving advice – the Big Four are Australia’s champions of corporate welfare. But it is time, particularly when busted here for blatant rorting, that you paid back the money and apologised.
Michael West established Michael West Media in 2016 to focus on journalism of high public interest, particularly the rising power of corporations over democracy. West was formerly a journalist and editor with Fairfax newspapers, a columnist for News Corp and even, once, a stockbroker.