Tag: taxation

Budgets are a matter of light and shade. You have to get the balance right. And so having spent the weekend talking about its wonderful childcare plans, yesterday the Government paraded Treasurer Joe Hockey in front of cameras toformally announce some of the budget’s so-called “tax integrity measures”.

Yes, tax integrity measures. Treasury’s spinners would have worked hard on that little catchphrase. Funny how measures to strengthen the integrity of a tax system always seem to deliver more tax to the government.

First, the Government plans to adjust anti-avoidance laws to crack down on multinationals shifting their profits to lower taxing jurisdictions. Second, the Government is going to introduce a Netflix tax – that is, try to impose the GST on digital downloads like books, music, videos and so on.

These two are linked, and in an important way that perhaps even Hockey does not realise. Analogue tax system, meet digital world.

Let’s start with profit shifting. I’ve tackled the claims that multinationals are evading taxation by shifting their profits across borders on The Drum before. Long story short: it’s a beat up. But the Government wants a budget that sounds fair and nothing sounds fairer than beating up on big companies. The corporate tax is a diffuse and confusing tax. It’s designed that way.

We are told Australian Taxation Officers have been “embedded” in 30 different multinational companies. We’re not told which companies. And at the press conference yesterday the treasurer didn’t want to tell us how much revenue the new anti-avoidance measures might raise. “It’s billions of dollars, obviously.”

This should be a red flag. It’s true that Treasury doesn’t have a good track record for estimating how much money new taxes will raise – recall the embarrassingly low take from the mining tax. But this looks less like prudence and more like a lack of confidence. Running a media or political campaign against corporate tax avoidance is easy. Trying to reverse engineer the tax accounting of the world’s biggest firms is hard.

The Government’s crackdown has a certain Sisyphean quality. In a world where much value is tied up in intangible intellectual property, it is borderline nonsensical for politicians to command that economic activity occurs in this jurisdiction or that jurisdiction.

It used to be the case that big firms had capital assets you could see and touch. Factories, vehicles, equipment, land. What mattered to firms were things like location, infrastructure, access to markets, the price and skills of the labour force and so on. But now the assets of the biggest firms can be placed anywhere in the world instantaneously. So they tend to be clustered in low tax jurisdictions with established and reliable legal systems. Like Ireland and Singapore.

What isn’t obvious is why this is a bad thing. Yes, higher tax countries like Australia would prefer that firms book their intellectual property here so Treasury could skim some cash off the top. But treating big firms to a publicity focused “crackdown” only harms what we should be trying to improve: the Australian investment environment. Firms should want to put their assets here. Implicitly, the Government’s profit shifting claims suggest they do not.

There is almost exactly the same issue with the Netflix tax. Once again, the Government is trying to shoehorn a national tax better suited for an analogue era into the age of digital globalisation.

“It is plainly unfair that a supplier of digital products into Australia is not charging the GST whilst someone locally has to charge the GST,” Hockey said at the press conference on Monday.

But why? The GST is a tax that the Australian government has chosen to place on Australian businesses. If there is an unfairness here it is an unfairness imposed by the government when it chose to introduce the GST. It is not “unfair” that other countries do not charge the Australian GST.

When we import goods from other countries – real or intangible – they are priced free of the burden of the many taxes and regulatory costs imposed by the Australian government. This does not make international trade unfair. In fact, all those institutional, regulatory and geographic differences between different trading partners are why international trade is so beneficial.

And – as with the profit shifting debate – the Government’s rhetoric is running far ahead of its capabilities. It is absolute fantasy that Hockey and the Australian Treasury will be able to impose our taxes on international digital goods providers in any meaningful way.

Yes, they might be able to convince a few of the big firms to play ball. But many already are playing ball. Apple, for instance, already charges GST. Those online firms with no Australian base and few Australian interests are unlikely to sign up to this new impost. What’s the Government going to do? Censor them?

It was reported last week that the Abbott Government has scotched many of the tax increases on the table in order to free itself to attack Bill Shorten for wanting to increase tax. That’s good, as far as it goes.

But it would be better if they opposed tax increases because they find increasing tax inherently objectionable.

Ultimately, the tax “integrity measures” announced yesterday have to be seen in the context of a Government that thinks the only viable way back to surplus is more revenue.

As part of its back to basics campaign, the Abbott Government has telegraphed a small business tax package for the 2015 budget.

The plan, as far as we know, is that small business will get a tax cut of about 1.5 per cent. Big business will be left paying the standard rate of 30 per cent.

The Coalition has long had a romantic attachment to small business as a sort of moral heart of Australian private enterprise, but this policy is the worst sort of small business fetishism.

It threatens to further undermine an already complicated corporate tax system, confuses the sources of economic growth, and will distract policymakers from the much more fundamental task of opening protected areas of the economy up to competition.

Let’s take these one at a time.

It beggars belief that while the political class is banging on about the convoluted the tax code, “unfair” tax concessions, and clever corporate tax minimisation, the Government is planning to increase the complexity of the corporate tax system.

How long before we see the first exposé in Fairfax business pages about large corporates rearranging themselves to take advantage of the concessional small business rates?

The proposed small business tax cut would make the Australian corporate tax system explicitly progressive. Just as we pay a higher rate of income tax according to our wealth, firms would pay a higher rate of corporate tax depending on their size. The United States has a progressive corporate tax. Ours is flat – 30 per cent no matter what.

Now, in practice, firms don’t pay the same 30 per cent rate. As my Institute of Public Affairs colleague Sinclair Davidson has documented, all those deductions, offsets and credits mean the effective tax rate – that is, the amount of tax paid – hovers about 25 per cent. On top of this, small businesses tend to have much more variable profitability, so they tend to pay less than big business already.

Even with this caveat in mind, progressive corporate taxes are a terrible idea.

Corporate taxes are very different from income taxes. Income taxes are ultimately paid by the people whom the tax is levied upon. The money comes out of the pocket of the person who fills in the tax return. I’d prefer our income tax to be flat. But progressivity for income tax at least has its own internal logic.

Corporate taxes are very different. The cost of corporate tax is ultimately paid by someone other than the corporation – passed on to consumers through higher prices, or to shareholders, or even to the company’s employees.

After all, companies don’t pay corporate tax, people do.

It’s not at all clear why we would want to tax people who buy products from large firms more than those who buy from small firms. Unless, of course, the small business tax cut is a form of primitive industry policy to prop up small business and make it artificially competitive.

Large firms exist for a reason: to take advantage of economies of scale. Large scale manufacturing is more efficient than small scale manufacturing. Big is beautiful. All else being equal those big multinationals that everyone hates have given us cheaper products and higher living standards.

This hints at a much deeper confusion underlying the Government’s small business fetishism.Joe Hockey likes to describe small business as the “engine room of the economy”. Funnily enough Wayne Swan used to say the same thing.

Of course, no single sector is the engine room of the economy. That’s just rhetoric. (Anyway, what happened to mining?)

But the Government seems to be attributing the economic characteristics of entrepreneurship onto small business. Entrepreneurs bring new products to market, put competitive pressure on existing firms to do better, undercut monopolies, and keep not just the economy going but our living standards improving.

All those giant firms that dominate the 21st century economy – Google, Apple, Microsoft, etc – were originally garage start-ups. Why would we want to penalise the next Google for growing by taxing them at a higher rate?

Obviously by definition entrepreneurs start as small business owners. But not all small businesses are equally entrepreneurial. The defining characteristic of an entrepreneur is that they do something new. They are driven by an idea. We hear from Canberra that big business is a threat to small business. Well, entrepreneurs are a threat to big business. Paper beats rock.

If the Government wants to help entrepreneurs, it shouldn’t be looking first at the tax code. It should be looking at the sorts of things raised by the Harper review into competition policy last week. That is, the regulatory restrictions on entering markets, like the taxi or retail pharmacy markets, which hold back entrepreneurs from exerting competitive pressure on incumbent businesses.

It’s true that the small business tax cut is a lot less objectionable than the tax increases being proposed, like the bank deposit tax and an increase in the GST. Maybe it’s churlish to criticise a tax cut when the real risk is tax increases.

But the Abbott Government says it understands the importance of free enterprise and the market economy. It should want to reduce corporate tax on all firms – not just small ones.

The worst thing about the Abbott Government’s newfound interest in reforming the GST is that it makes Kevin Rudd right.

During the 2013 campaign one of Rudd’s biggest attacks on the Coalition was that Tony Abbott was desperate to increase the GST.

The sole hook for this claim was the fact that the Coalition had promised a tax review that, unlike Rudd’s Henry Review, was supposed to scrutinise the GST alongside everything else.

On that basis any attempt to study Australia’s tax mix could be assumed as a plan to increase any and every tax.

Rudd’s GST attack was deliberate, disingenuous fearmongering – based on virtually nothing, used to fill out a campaign desperate for anything.

Yet now here we are, in 2015, and the Coalition can’t help itself talking about changing the GST.

Rudd would be feeling pretty good about his ability to predict the future. The great sage of Griffith.

There are apparently two proposals on the cards. The first is lowering the threshold at which consumers can import goods without paying GST. The idea is that local retail doesn’t compete on a level playing field against foreign websites.

The second is the perennial one of broadening the base. The GST should be applied to things like fresh food – things that were specifically excluded when the tax was first introduced by the Howard government at the turn of the century.

Both interesting ideas. It’s nice to chat about policy.

Incidentally, these proposals will raise the government quite a bit of money.

It’s painfully obvious that the main reason we’re talking about the changing the GST is because of the Government’s dire budget and political situation.

There’s a big difference between tax reform and tax grabs. The sudden interest in the GST looks everything like a tax grab.

But there’s another reason for the GST gabfest: the Coalition’s search for a “narrative” that will push them through to the next election.

Folk political memory recalls how John Howard won his first re-election on the GST – the same new tax that had sunk John Hewson just a few years before. Even more impressively, Howard pulled off this trick after an unfortunate and unhappy first term.

So you can understand why trying to replicate the master’s 1998 success might have some appeal.

But the GST was a grand program, not a technical adjustment. When Howard and Peter Costello announced the GST they described it as “not a new tax, a new tax system”.

The idea was not that the GST would simply replace the sales tax but would reduce taxes across the board. Howard claimed “the heart” of the system was “the largest personal income tax cut in Australia’s history”. And the GST was supposed to allow states to abolish stamp duties and transaction taxes, and a host of other inefficient taxes.

Despite some superficial similarities, Howard was in a very different political space to Abbott. Howard had much more political capital. Budget repair was on track. There was a sense in the late 1990s that we had prosperity in our future – a sense somewhat lacking today.

And, most of all, Howard’s “non-core” promises did nowhere near as much damage as Abbott’s policy backflips have done.

One of the most credibility damaging moves this Government made was its introduction of the deficit levy on high income earners in the 2014 budget.

Not only did it destroy the promise that “taxes (will) always be lower under the Coalition”, but it raised the marginal tax rate on high income earners to 49 per cent – just under that morally dubious rate where more marginal income goes to the government than to the earner.

The Abbott Government’s approach to taxation thus far has been almost exactly the same Labor’s. They’ve been trying to quietly bump up taxes and tax rates at the edges without causing a stir. In August last year the indexation of the fuel excise resumed. In April the Fringe Benefit Tax rate is going to be bumped up as well.

Then of course there’s bracket creep, which steadily and inexorably raises everybody’s tax rate without the Government having to lift a finger.

You might object that possible changes to the GST should be treated on their own merits. They’re either good ideas or bad ones, regardless of what else is going on in the broader economic or political sphere.

As my IPA colleague Mikayla Novak has pointed out, lowering the import threshold is in the not-a-good-idea category. It won’t fix the problems of the retail sector, and it would be prohibitively expensive to impose.

And as for broadening the base? Well, a broad tax is better than a narrow one. But unless this change is matched by wider reform, imposing the GST on food would be simply soaking the poor.

But the Government isn’t thinking about efficiency, or fairness. It’s thinking about politics. Let’s hope parliament doesn’t use the GST for a short-term budget fix.

Few things excite a treasurer more than tax avoidance.

The idea conjures up fantasies of great pots of untaxed money – money the government is morally entitled to but for one reason or another (the weakness of previous administrations, probably) is being denied.

No surprise then, as his budget savings fade away into nothingness, Joe Hockey has turned his mind to the old corporate tax avoidance chestnut.

On the weekend in Cairns the G20 finance ministers agreed to tackle “base erosion and profit shifting … to make sure companies pay their fair share in tax”. Our very own Hockey, as G20 host, is leading the charge.

Profit shifting refers to the fear that multinational firms are structuring themselves to route profits through lower-taxing countries.

Base erosion is the fear that this profit shifting is eroding the tax base, starving governments of funds.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) started focusing on base erosion and profit shifting last year, pushing it to the front of the G20’s agenda.

They’ve been amply backed up by breathless newspaper stories about the complex tax structures of firms like Apple that have divisions in Ireland and the Netherlands.

All very interesting except for one thing. The profit shifting problem isn’t that much of a problem.

It’s true that in the 1990s, when economists and policymakers first turned their mind to how multinational firms plan their tax liabilities, they looked at aggregate country-level data and concluded (as one of the first major studies said) “companies locate a sizable fraction of their foreign activity in tax havens”.

This early work implied profit shifting was both real and substantial.

But now economists are working with more fine-grained data specifying how firms structure their internal debt around global affiliates. And as they look closer at those affiliates, the evidence is telling a very different story.

A 2014 overview of the empirical literature by one of the major scholars of global tax avoidance, Dhammika Dharmapala, concludes “in the more recent empirical literature, which uses new and richer sources of data, the estimated magnitude of (base erosion and profit shifting) is typically much smaller than that found in earlier studies”.

There is even, as Dharmapala points out, some evidence to suggest profit shifting has been declining in the last decade, not increasing.

We’re now talking about multinational corporations shifting somewhere between 2 per cent and 4 per cent of their profits to tax havens.

Two to 4 per cent is not nothing, of course.

But these lower numbers help resolve the big profit shifting puzzle. If the corporate tax base is being eroded, then why is revenue from corporate tax going up?

Between 1965 and 2007 corporate income tax revenue increased from 2.2 per cent of GDP to 3.8 per cent of GDP in OECD countries. (Revenue fell somewhat during the Global Financial Crisis but is on the rebound.) This despite the fact that corporate tax rates have been lowered over the last 40 years.

Even the OECD, in its 2013 paper Addressing Base Erosion and Profit Shifting, thinks the stability of corporate tax revenue is a bit odd (see here, page 16).

Perhaps the answer is simple: profit shifting isn’t as big a deal as newspapers and treasurers think.

At least, if nothing else, those facts ought to engender some scepticism about whether there really is a profit shifting crisis. Let alone one that requires urgent, internationally coordinated action.

So where is that scepticism?

We’ve seen how quickly commentators look for self-interested political motivations behind government pronouncements on national security and foreign policy. This is healthy. But all that valuable distrust seems to disappear when we talk about crackdowns on corporate tax – a field where political self-interest is blindingly obvious.

Hockey admitted earlier this month Australia has “amongst the strongest anti-avoidance laws in the world”.

Like many other countries, Australia has a general anti-avoidance rule, a catch-all law that allows a court to override any scheme it believes is designed primarily to produce a tax advantage.

Our anti-avoidance rule is incredibly broad and creates enormous uncertainty. But it is also extremely powerful. If there was really a tax avoidance problem in Australia the authorities would be well equipped to handle it.

Multinational corporations have to make choices when deciding where they should base themselves. Different countries have different labour costs, workforce skills, levels of infrastructure, protection of the rule of law, and, of course, different tax rates.

The G20’s real gripe is that they are being forced to compete for the tax affections of the world’s biggest companies.

You can understand why the treasurers of the world think tax competition is harmful. They want to maximise their government’s revenue.

It’s not obvious why we should share their concern.

At the end of the day, consumers and workers benefit when corporate tax rates are low and attractive. Anything that pressures our governments to keep those rates low is a good thing.

In 1979, the free market economist Milton Friedman reviewed Margaret Thatcher’s first budget in his Newsweek column. Like Australia today, Britain faced a serious long-term budget problem. Like Tony Abbott, Thatcher had been voted in to fix it.

Friedman thought her budget was excellent – a rare example of financial prudence in a highly imprudent decade. It was chock-full of privatisations and tax reforms. The sort of stuff Thatcher became legendary for.

But, alongside the tax reductions and spending cuts, the Thatcher budget also increased Britain’s sales tax to compensate for some lost revenue.

This was a problem. As Friedman wrote, “From the long-run point of view, it seems to me preferable to resort to a temporarily higher level of borrowing rather than a possibly permanently higher level of indirect taxes.”

In other words, if the unpalatable choice is between a deficit and a tax hike, then a slightly prolonged deficit is the lesser of two evils.

Thirty-five years later, the Abbott Government’s proposed deficit levy is supposed to be a temporary measure – perhaps limited to four years.

Abbott should listen to Friedman. “Temporary” taxes are rarely temporary. Once introduced, they have a habit of staying high and sticking around.

After all, Australia’s income tax itself was only meant to be short-term thing. The Commonwealth Government introduced the income tax during the First World War in order to pay for the high cost of military participation.

Of course, as the Commission of Audit demonstrated dramatically last week, the choice the government faces is not between a prolonged deficit and higher taxes. The Government could cut spending and abandon its Direct Action and paid parental leave schemes.

There is something faintly ludicrous about a Government fighting its budget battle on two fronts.

For the free market right, the deficit levy is not just a broken promise – we’ve come to expect broken promises in Australian politics – but a betrayal by a leadership team that, for the last six years, has been claiming to favour low taxes above everything else.

For the left, the Commission of Audit represents a fundamental attack on the Australian social democratic settlement.

The audit commission report is remarkable. It is incredibly rare to see major government reports so explicitly driven by philosophical beliefs about the proper scope of government.

This is something Australian politics could do with more of, not less. Bold premises, radical conclusions. It’s similar in a way to what came out of Kevin Rudd’s 2020 Summit, but the audit commission is more coherent and doesn’t bother pretending to be the result of Ruddian consensus politics.

Yet to what end? The Abbott Government won’t do much with the report. What is radical in the audit commission is unlikely to be adopted. The policies which will be adopted have been floating around forever.

There is no way that this Government will be returning income taxes to the states. Sure, Tony Abbott has gone through an evolution of his views on federalism since he wrote his 2009 book Battlelines. He is apparently no longer a myopic centraliser. But there is no one in Government with appetite for such epoch-making reforms.

The things that will be adopted – like selling Medibank Private – have been obvious low-hanging fruit for many years.

So in many ways the audit commission reveals the Abbott Government’s lack of reforming ambition rather than its radicalism.

The deficit levy underscores that timidity. Don’t be fooled by the recent polls. Compared to cutting spending, raising taxes is the easy option.

The basic political economy problems with deficits and taxes are similar.

The reason it’s important to return the budget to surplus is to ensure that there is constant pressure on politicians to spend only what the tax system brings them. This is because every political incentive goes the other way. The best way to ensure a voting bloc supports you is to offer them financial support. Unchecked, governments want to spend more than they tax.

The only real constraint on this runaway spending dynamic is the fiscal norm that says budgets need to be returned to surplus. Short-term governments rarely worry about long-term consequences.

So it is important that we reduce the deficit as soon as possible. But not by any means possible.

Because, as Milton Friedman cautioned Margaret Thatcher, while the long-term dynamic of forgiving budget deficits would be bad, the medium-term dynamic of introducing higher taxes would be far worse.

Yesterday morning Tony Abbott said “in the long run the voters will thank us for doing what is absolutely necessary”.

Maybe. But in the long run voters should have no confidence that this Government – or a future Labor government – will happily forego the new stream of revenue the deficit tax will provide.