I Agree that the ATO has too much discretionary powers During the Senate Finance Committee inquiry of 5 years ago the Microsoft Vice President said that the ATO had approved Microsoft's selling its products direct from Singapore to Australian customers thereby not declaring any profit in Australia to be corporately taxed and to add insult to injury that that could be done in traunches less than $1000 to avoid Aus GST.
At that time the top end of the ATO was mostly staffed by specialists from the Big 4 Multinational Tax Accountancy firms who design the agressive tax "minimisation " schemes in the first instance and of course these Big 4 are career paths for ex ATO execs.
IMO this relationship seems to be too comfortable .
This Government has had 6 years since then to tighten up tax loopholes used my Multinationals in Transfer Pricing, Debt Loading & Cash Boxing extrarorbitant patent & IP Royalties thereby minimising profit & corporate tax in Aus.
The fairest & most efficient way of taxing such Multinationals in Aus is to simply impose a flat tax on Aus revenue and then let them "cook the books" to avoid tax in other jurisdictions.
We simply need to simplify the Tax Code & give it teeth and The Greens are the only party with such policy and we're less than 3 months out from the Election
The unfair thing about all this trans-national tax dodgery is that when a small business is audited, the ATO goes through it like a dose of salts. My small business was audited twice during a 20 year period and it cost me heaps in assembling all the data for the audits and employing my accountant for 5 hours on both occassions and the absurd thing was that I was refunded a very small amount on both occassions and no apologies; once in GST and the other in corporate tax.
