En Passant

If the UK Public Accounts Committee can question Starbucks, Amazon and Google about their tax affairs, and then condemn them for not paying any tax in Britain, we can do it here in Australia.

A thoroughgoing investigation into the tax affairs of big business is needed to see just what they get up to and whether they are paying a fair share of tax in Australia. After all, what has big business got to hide? Over to you Senators Rhiannon and Cameron.

Without a mass working class movement demanding and winning better wages, more jobs and price controls as well as more tax paid by the rich and big business, the rich and big business will continue to get richer and pay less and less tax.

There are 2 important aspects of tax havens – low or no tax and bank secrecy. Henry is about less imposition by the state on the other hostile brothers and in keeping the accumulation process which creates surplus value ticking over and running smoothly it has to reduce its taxes on capital to do so. This is the logic of tax competition – and tax havens are its ultimate expression.

Between $21 and $32 trillion – as much as Japan and America’s GDPs combined – has been stashed in offshore tax havens by the world’s richest 10 million individuals. Just 92,000 of them claim a $9.8 trillion dollar share.

Taxing foreign residents on their currently exempt capital gains will have little or no impact on foreign investment given that the gains are supposedly taxed in comparable tax jurisdictions. It will however bring revenue onshore that is currently going into the coffers of, for example, the US and European Treasuries, or being hidden in places like the Cayman Islands.

The difficulties in gathering information and continuing prosecutions that the ACC identified justify more Wickenby powers, not less, and more Wickenby resources, not less, to combat international tax evasion and avoidance.

Tax terrorists are a greater threat to Australian society than individuals wanting to blow up public buildings and kill tens of people. Stop tax terrorism. Make the rich pay.

Some of may have been following what I wrote about the the private equity fund Texas Pacific Group.  See for example Private equity funds and the pillage of Australia. TPG made $1.5 billion profit on its restructuring investment in Myer. The money came from the US via the Cayman Islands, Luxembourg and then the Netherlands. It removed the [...]

Private equity funds add no real value to Australian society. And they may avoid tax altogether. Where is the political outrage from the Government and Opposition about this pillage of our society? Silence is all I have heard to date. An enquiry into the impact of these vultures on Australian society is overdue.

Here is part of what the Australian Tax Office wrote to Senator Carl Levin, the Chair of the US Committee on Homeland Security and Government Affairs. ‘In our opinion, entities established in some states of the US, for example some US incorporated companies, have some of these same attributes as entities established in secrecy havens.’  These [...]