Lessons from Australia: Let the sunshine in!

Our friends and colleagues in Australia of the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability & Research, Tax Justice Network Australia, and researchers from the University of Technology Sydney Business School have developed a new tool that pulls together 10 years of corporate tax data in Australia. They want to keep developing and expanding this tool which helps make corporate tax data more easily accessible to everyone. Later in 2025 they will begin to get the new public country-by country reporting data coming through due to Australia’s new, world-leading multinational tax transparency reporting requirement. When they incorporate that, this tool will be even better. Jason Ward describes this new tool for us:

Despite some progress, the world’s largest multinational corporations – many with unprecedented monopoly power – continue to shift hundreds of billions in profits ever year to tax havens. Put simply, this theft by the world’s wealthiest companies and individuals steals funding for essential public services and infrastructure. A fabricated funding gap is then used to justify governments turning over responsibility for public services to extractive for-profit investors. This dangerous spiral continues to exacerbate inequality, between the global north and south and increasingly within nations in both the north and the south. The harm is heavily concentrated on those that are already the most vulnerable. To drive public pressure and create the political will for tax reforms and adequate funding for quality public services, greater transparency is urgently needed.

Tax dodging, as with pollution and worker exploitation, externalises the costs of illegitimate corporate behaviour on the general public.  However, its hard to see tax dodging directly and therefore frequently harder to fix. Loopholes that enable exploitative and unfair tax dodging to continue are not, by design, easily visible, nor are tax payments (or lack thereof) by large corporations. What is seen is degraded public health, education and social services and deteriorating infrastructure. However, it is not always easy to connect the dots.

When cases of corporate tax dodging are exposed, the villains simply state that ‘we follow the law…’. Well-funded tax dodging enablers say ‘if you don’t like the law change it, don’t blame the corporations…’. However, national and international tax systems have been and continue to be perverted by corporate power and lobbying. Corporations have written the rules in their favour and to the detriment of society. How can societies overcome this power and information imbalance and make these problems – and the causes – clearly visible?

Sunshine is a powerful disinfectant and has been vigorously opposed by tax dodging multinational corporations and the enablers that prefer to keep the public, and elected representatives, in the dark. Tax transparency must continue to bloom to create the public demand and political will for long overdue changes to national and global tax systems that effectively tackle inequality and lead towards fairness and sustainability.

With strong civil society and union demands, the Australian government resisted intense global lobbying and has now passed the world’s best multinational tax transparency reporting requirement. The data, public country-by-country reporting (based on the GRI Tax Standard) for Australia and 40 of the most abused corporate tax havens, will begin to appear in 2026. This will help shed further light on the tax practices of most of the world’s large multinationals, those that have at least AUD$10 million in annual Australian revenue.

Significantly, public support for this measure was in part driven by already existing tax transparency reporting in Australia. For the last ten years, the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has published the total income, taxable income and tax payable for any company with over $200 million in total income. While tax collections have improved significantly over this time, every year there is renewed public outrage over how many large corporations generated massive revenues and still pay ZERO, or very little, in tax. There are 98 companies that have paid ZERO tax over the whole decade. As one example, DP World – one of two large and highly profitable port operators which is controlled by Dubai’s royal family and operates major ports around the world – has not paid one cent in corporate income tax in Australia over the full decade. On the positive side, with transparency, public campaigning and government reforms, corporations like Chevron, Exxon and Glencore – with years of aggressive tax dodging – are now top taxpayers in Australia. Chevron now pays more income tax in Australia than in the US or any country in the world.

To help make this ATO data more accessible for everyone and to allow people to quickly check on individual corporations, a collaboration between CICTAR, Tax Justice Network – Australia, and researchers from the University of Technology Sydney (UTS) Business School have developed a new tool that pulls together the full 10 years of corporate tax data. Check it out: https://www.infotax.media/data_analytics

Currently, it includes 1,028 corporations for which there is a full 10 years of data. Other corporations and additional functionality will be added. If corporations are tax dodging in Australia – with relatively robust enforcement – it would be expected that they are tax dodging in other jurisdictions as well. The Australian data is a great place to start when looking at multinational tax practices. This data should be available in every country.

This Australian collaboration eagerly anticipates publicising the far better and more comprehensive public country-by-country reporting data when it begins to become available next year. Going beyond Australia’s current tax transparency, this will either motivate corporations to temper aggressive tax dodging or face exposure to which tax havens are being abused to shift profits and avoid obligations in Australia. The Australian data will be useful globally to identify multinational profit shifting patterns.

For a current example of what this data can reveal, the EU Tax Observatory’s Taxplorer tool, provides a compilation of data from 150 corporations that already voluntarily provide some form of country-by-country reporting. The simplest and clearest metric is the ability to examine profits per employee in each jurisdiction. One might conclude that Bermuda shorts or Panama hats are a massive boost to worker productivity, or perhaps something else is going on? Data from the EU’s public country by country reporting directive will also be available soon but only requires reporting on EU member states and from a short and lacking list of ‘non-cooperative’ jurisdictions.

It’s time to end the myth of corporate tax payments (or lack thereof) as being somehow commercially sensitive and confidential. For large corporates this data must be public everywhere. Banks in the EU have been required to produce public country by country reporting for the last decade and it has not created any competitive disadvantage compared to global peers. Large multinationals have been reporting country by country tax payments under the OECD’s base erosion and profit shifting (BEPS) project since 2016; however, this data is strictly confidential and only available to a small number of tax authorities and can’t inform other arms of government or other stakeholders.

Once we can see the data, companies that pay taxes appropriately where profits are genuinely earned from sales, services, manufacturing or resource extraction should be congratulated. These companies, who are more likely to treat all stakeholders with greater respect, operate at a major competitive disadvantage to large tax dodging multinationals. Business should compete on quality and innovation rather than ability and willingness to exploit loopholes and avoid obligations. Corporations who abuse accounting tricks to shift profits through complex global corporate structures should be named and shamed.

With transparency both governments and consumers can make informed choices about which companies they choose to do business with. Investors will know which companies compete on smart, innovative and sustainable long-term business strategies and which ones take major risks through questionable and contestable short-term and unsustainable financial engineering schemes. Even in the US, the Financial Accounting Standards Board (FASB) – following pressure from investors – has mandated greater transparency from US companies on international tax payments

Other countries, or regional bodies, must push forward with public country by country reporting for multinationals until we have full public country by country reporting as a global standard through the emerging UN Tax Convention. People around the world should demand immediate transparency on tax payments by the largest corporations in their own countries. The public has a right to know now!

When people are able to see the scale of the problem – and how, where and who is stealing from our public coffers, the political will for change will become undeniable.

[Image credit: JJ Harrison (https://www.jjharrison.com.au/) CC BY-SA 3.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0 via Wikimedia Commons]