Almost a third of all large companies operating in Australia didn't pay any tax in the 2022-23 financial year.The Australian Taxation Office's (ATO) Corporate tax transparency report revealed that 1253 large entities didn't pay any tax that year.While an increase on the year before from 831, the proportion of businesses not paying tax has remained steady at 31 per cent.
People walking out of the ATO Office. (AFR/ Luis Enrique Ascui)The ATO said the majority of those companies didn't have to pay tax due to an accounting or tax loss.Others used tax losses from the previous year to negate their tax bill, while a small proportion utilised tax offsets.The ATO said tax avoidance has reduced in recent years."We continue to see improvement in the tax compliance of large businesses, reflecting how the ATO's Tax Avoidance Taskforce has supported improvement in voluntary compliance in addition to strong compliance actions," ATO Deputy Commissioner Rebecca Saint said.Overall, the amount collected by the ATO from big businesses rose to around $100 billion.Just under $98 billion of that was income tax – a record figure that was up 16.7 per cent from the year before.
Mining company tax accounted for more than half of all tax paid by big businesses. (The Sydney Morning Herald)"This is a great result for the Australian community," ATO Deputy Commissioner Rebecca Saint said."Tax paid in 2022–23 was again the highest since (corporate tax transparency) reporting started."When you include the additional tax revenue raised by the Tax Avoidance Taskforce for the year, we collected around $100 billion from large corporates in 2022–23."According to the ATO, the amount of tax not paid by big businesses was less than 5 per cent.Beards, wallpaper and windows: The most bizarre taxes in history View Gallery"Corporate tax compliance in Australia sets the bar for the rest of the world, and these results in part reflect years of sustained effort from the ATO's Tax Avoidance Taskforce to drive and support increased tax compliance by large businesses," Saint said."Our tax gap estimates show that after ATO compliance activities, large corporates paid 96 per cent of all income tax they should have for 2021–22."As they should be, large corporate groups are amongst the highest in net tax performance of all population segments."The mining sector paid more than half of all tax from large corporations, while oil and gas companies accounted for more than 10 per cent.
