The Tax Office has been writing off hard-to-collect debts for years, but it hasn’t had the power to do it. Unless we give it that power, it’ll be forced to push vulnerable Australians into debt.
Sparked by the PwC scandal, the measures will expand tax promoter penalty laws to make it easier for the Australian Taxation Office to apply them to advisers and firms who promote tax avoidance.
Purporting to distribute money to children to take advantage of their tax-free thresholds sends
a message about how important it is to be truthful when complying with the tax law.
Peter Whiteford, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University
The combination of community activism, journalistic investigation, political scrutiny and the legal aid system has ultimately provided a remedy to the victims.
The budget looks good, for now. But the surge in taxable profits will subside as companies find ways to shift profits offshore. We’ve come up a better way to tax onshore what happens onshore.
Workers are getting ABNs and being employed as contractors responsible for their own tax payments. This is undercutting conditions and eroding the most important part of the nation’s tax base.
Australia’s labour market does a relatively good job of accommodating the preferences of the majority of workers. But that’s not to say there’s no-one who wouldn’t prefer to work more – or less.
Tax avoidance, or the use of legal arrangements to reduce tax, is rife. According to the Australian Tax Office (ATO), Australian companies in 2012 sent almost A$60 billion to related parties in tax havens…
Shadow Treasurer Joe Hockey has launched a fierce attack on the Australian Taxation Office, accusing it of having had “an insular and inward looking culture” for too long and raising the spectre of possibly…
In the UK the recent boycott of Starbucks by consumers has helped elicit a pledge from the coffee giant to pay £20 million in taxes over the next two years. In Australia, consumers would be appalled to…