Tag: Sinclair Davidson

With Sinclair Davidson

The Turnbull government’s diverted profit tax has passed the Parliament. Introduced in response to the moral panic that, somewhere, somehow multinational corporations don’t pay a fair share of taxation, this new tax is at odds with the government’s professed belief in lowering the corporate tax burdens, is at odds with our international competitors, and (as we learnt just this month), is even at odds with the Australian Taxation Office’s tax enforcement priorities.

The 40 per cent tax on diverted profits is expected to raise $100 million. That implies that the federal government estimates a mere $250 million of diverted profits. To put that figure into perspective, the federal government recently announced a tightening of the rules on the grandparent child care benefit. That policy change would result in welfare savings of $250 million.

Grandparents allegedly rorting the welfare system are a much bigger budget problem than multinational corporations allegedly rorting the tax system.

Indeed, Tax Commissioner Chris Jordan gave the game away on March 16 when he told a Tax Institute conference that the gap between what large corporates and multinationals pay and what they should pay in tax was “relatively modest” and that “the biggest gap we’ve got in the system is us” – that is, individual taxpayers.

After five years of hyperventilating about corporate tax avoidance, this is a striking confession. The previous treasurer Joe Hockey made much of the fact that the ATO had identified 30 multinational corporations likely to offend and had embedded agents in those firms and would carefully investigating their practices.

True, Scott Morrison did say that this diverted profits tax is a tax integrity measure. Ensuring the integrity of the tax base is a legitimate policy goal. But a diverted profits tax is a counterproductive and illiberal way to go about it.

It allows the ATO to impose upfront liability and collect tax on allegedly diverted profits. It reverses the onus of proof and removes the right to silence – thus multinational corporations the right to natural justice under the Australian legal system. That is not a reasonable integrity measure but rather a punitive regime that targets foreign investors and successful Australian companies.

This is a policy that substantially increases the powers of the ATO without any governance measures to ensure that abuses do not occur. No doubt these powers will be exercised by the ATO to collect revenue beyond the amount intended by Parliament. That is simply the nature of regulatory bureaucracies and it will be small comfort for those multinationals who successfully challenge the ATO that their money is eventually returned to them.

Even more fundamentally, the diverted profits tax doesn’t sit well with current policy settings, nor with economic reality. There is currently a lot of effort and anti-business rhetoric to collect $100 million. Is it a coincidence that business investment is low? Or is that government is passing tax laws that violate societal norms of fairness and are creating an uncertain and arbitrary tax environment?

Business doesn’t know what tax rate they will face in Australia in years to come. It could be 30 per cent. It could go down to 25 per cent over 10 years if the Turnbull government’s corporate tax cut goes through. Or it could be as high as 40 per cent if some Canberra bureaucrat, empowered by the diverted profits tax, gets a bee in their bonnet about multinational structures they do not understand.

There’s been a lot of talk about policy uncertainty in the Australian energy market. With a lot less fanfare the corporate tax confusion is doing the same to the entire corporate sector. This is not how to ensure jobs and growth

In the meantime, Australia is facing an international environment where the British Prime Minister is openly discussing turning the UKinto a tax haven, and the Trump administration wants to reduce America’s corporate tax rate to between 15 and 20 per cent. The Turnbull government has chosen the wrong time to put multinational engagement with Australia at risk.

with Sinclair Davidson

The title of the interim report of the Senate economics committee inquiry into corporate tax avoidance, released this week, is “You cannot tax what you cannot see”.

This is a rather embarrassing admission that the evidence for widespread corporate tax avoidance – the avoidance which has filled so many newspaper columns, so many hyperbolic speeches in parliament – just doesn’t exist.

Imagine being pulled over by the police and told that even though you’ve been observed driving below the speed limit, stopping at stop signs, giving way at give way signs, indicating correctly, wearing your seatbelt, and maintaining a respectable distance from the car in front, the police have a hunch you’re somehow violating community expectations.

While the Senate committee feels sure there are questionable corporate tax practices going on, it doesn’t actually find any.

Rather, it relies very heavily on the political rhetoric of a now-discredited 2014 report by the Tax Justice Network, which claimed that firms were denying the government vast sums of revenue through opaque and confusing tax arrangements.

In fact, what the committee’s interim report shows is that the tax practices of the big tech firms are quite explicable.

For instance, Microsoft and Google have their regional headquarters in Singapore. As the committee admits, these headquarters are not shells, existing solely to avoid giving Joe Hockey money. They’re real. They have real offices, real assets, and real staff doing real work. In Singapore. Not Australia. Just because those Singapore headquarters digitally export some products and services to Australia does not mean they should pay Australian corporate tax on the profits.

Even more explicable is large firms with large research and development costs deducting those costs from their taxable profits. The R&D corporate tax deduction is bipartisan government policy. It seems a bit much for governments to introduce a tax incentive then get angry with firms for using it.

The lack of evidence of tax avoidance makes the committee’s belief that the Australian government should name and shame corporate tax avoiders vaguely comic.

Certainly, the Australian Tax Office should be vigilant ensuring firms are paying what they owe. Firms that fail to do so should face the full consequences of the law. But that already happens. Australia has some of the strongest anti-avoidance laws on the planet. The government has the tools, right now, to deal with illegal tax evasion.

Underpinning this whole debate is the fact that Australia’s corporate tax rate is very high. At 30 per cent, it is substantially above the OECD average of 25.3 per cent. And Australia is one of the most heavily reliant countries on corporate tax revenue in the OECD. The Senate committee admits that this heavy burden puts Australia at a “comparative disadvantage”.

With such a disadvantage, it is no surprise that multinational companies are not lining up to establish their regional headquarters here.

But a failure to establish regional headquarters in Australia – “avoiding permanent establishment” in the lingo of the committee – does not constitute tax avoidance. Australia’s tax and regulatory environment is not competitive. Singapore’s is competitive. This ought to cause some soul-searching by the Parliament. Handwringing about phantom corporate tax avoidance just postpones consideration of the real problem.

Perhaps we might expect the sort of anti-corporate nonsense espoused at the inquiry from Labor and the Greens. What’s really disappointing is the full-throated support of the corporate tax panic from the Coalition.

Government senators on the committee wrote a dissenting minority report. Yet their complaint was that the committee did not fully acknowledge all the exciting work the Abbott government was doing to clamp down on multinationals.

Earlier this year the government released its own proposed legislation to deal with corporate tax avoidance. In effect that legislation would empower the ATO to second-guess where it feels profits should be booked for tax purposes.

The consequences of such an approach would be dire. It would expose multinational firms to double taxation. It would be a huge incentive for those firms to leave Australia all together, taking jobs and economic activity with them.

All this fretting about tax avoidance makes good demagoguery. But it might seriously harm Australia’s economy.

with Sinclair Davidson

The corporate tax profit shifting debate is a classic example of moral panic. First, it’s incredibly complicated. How many Australians could explain how company tax is calculated, let alone what business practices a “double Irish Dutch sandwich” refers to?

Second, it’s driven by hyperbolic and simplistic reports of companies paying little to no tax. These stories pivot on even more complicated scandals, such as “Lux Leaks”, and the technicalities of foreign tax systems.

And third, it’s wildly overstated. The best current estimates of how much corporate tax is shifted across borders is in the realm of 2 per cent to 4 per cent of total corporate tax.

It’s true that earlier estimates in the 1990s were much more than that. It was those high estimates that got the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development interested in the issue. But the firm- and affiliate-level evidence is better now. It’s pointless to scrutinise a moral panic for the clarity of its claims. But the corporate tax debate is missing the point.

As a society we don’t value firms for the money the government extracts from them. We value firms because they produce goods and offer services that make us richer, our lives easier, more convenient and more enjoyable, and our standards of living higher.

We ought to design our tax system to encourage foreign firms operating and doing business on Australian shores, bringing investment and jobs. Any attempt to tackle profit shifting that raises uncertainty or lowers Australia’s investment climate would be a disaster.

The corporate tax is not a good tax. As a recent Treasury paper pointed out, it is one of the most inefficient taxes levied by Australian governments. The burden of the corporate tax is scattered and obscure.

Greens leader Christine Milne has been running around this week accusing companies of not paying their “fair share”. But that fair share is always and inevitably passed on to someone else. The literature on the incidence of corporate taxation suggests the burden of corporate tax is worn in the short term by investors, and in the long run by a combination of investors and workers. Of course, under our superannuation system every worker is an investor as well.

Few of the standard justifications for the existence of corporate tax – particularly in a small, open economy – are compelling. One fear is that company owners might divert their personal income into the company. But they’d still have to pay capital gains tax on the way out again. Another argument is that corporate tax is an easy way to get money out of multinationals. Absurd, we know.

That’s why there are academic tax papers with titles such as “Why is there corporate taxation in a small open economy?” and “Can capital income taxes survive? And should they?”

For the political class, the corporate tax has one great advantage: it’s unclear who ultimately pays. It’s easy and comfortable to beat up on corporations, just as long as you stay mum about who actually ends up paying corporate tax. The whole system rests on this clever one-two trick. Who could sympathise with big bad business?

But even if the government wishes to keep the corporate tax fiscal illusion going, there’s hope. For all the handwringing about the double Irish Dutch sandwich, one point often missed is that Ireland has been very clever. That country’s low corporate tax rates have brought in multinationals, and with them jobs and investment.

It’s not obvious those low rates have come at a cost to the Irish budget. Corporate tax revenue as a percentage of total revenue in Ireland is almost exactly the OECD average. There’s no reason we couldn’t copy the Irish example – get in on the Irish-Dutch sandwich ourselves. The Irish make their own luck. So should we.