On Friday 10.12.2021, the ATO today published the Corporate Tax Transparency Report 2019-20. It is the seventh annual report on corporate tax transparency (and is designed to inform public debate about the corporate tax system. It analyses aggregated data from the 2019–20 income tax returns of some of the largest corporations operating in Australia. It describes changes and trends in key headline figures for the population, as well as data by industry segment and ownership group.
Introduction
The corporate tax transparency population includes:
- Australian public and foreign-owned corporate tax entities with total income of $100 million or more
- Australian-owned resident private companies with total income of $200 million or more
- entities that have petroleum resource rent tax (PRRT) payable.
Legislation specifies the type of information we are required to report on. In producing this report, we take the data from three labels in the tax return – total income, taxable income and tax payable – for corporations that meet the population income threshold.
It is important to note that data in the corporate tax transparency report is taken directly from tax returns and does not reflect any intervention or compliance work after lodgment of the returns. Nor does it provide additional detail on recipients of JobKeeper or other COVID-19 stimulus payments.
Corporations can also publish their own reports about their tax positions through the Voluntary Tax Transparency Code, which complements Australia’s existing tax transparency measures.
Highlights
- There are 2,370 entities in this year’s population; this represents a net increase of 59 entities (2.6%) on 2018–19.
- Total income increased to $2,184.5 billion, an increase of 2.6%.
- Taxable income increased to $208.4 billion, an increase 0.1%.
- Tax payable increased to $57.2 billion, an increase of 2.0%.
- Foreign-owned entities account for 58.2% of the corporate transparency population in 2019–20 and 28.9% of tax payable.
- Australian public entities account for 21.6% of the population and 62.8% of tax payable.
- Australian private entities account for 20.2% of the population and nearly 8.3% of tax payable.
- Entities with income of more than $5 billion represent around 2.7% of the corporate transparency population and account for around 57.0% of tax payable (around $32.6 billion).
- Entities with income of between $250 million and $5 billion represent the largest portion 55.7% of the corporate transparency population, and also account for 37.9% of the tax payable (around $21.7 billion).
- Smaller entities – those with income of less than $250 million – account for 41.6% of the population but only 5.0% of the tax payable (around $2.9 billion).
- Tax payable in the corporate tax transparency population was again dominated by the mining, energy and water segment in 2019–20. The share of tax payable attributable to the mining, energy and water segment was again higher than in previous years, primarily due to high iron ore prices.
- 33.0% of the population did not pay any tax (782 entities).
- PRRT payable is down 16.7% this year to $881.2 million.
ATO website – corporate tax transparency report 2019-20
[Tax Month – December 2021 – Previous 2021] 12.12.21