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Australia set to take on the cockroaches of multinational tax chicanery
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Victoria Police is begging for an end to Melbourne’s raging tobacco wars, saying state government inaction has poured fuel on the escalating crisis.
Victoria Police is begging the state government to urgently legislate a tobacco licensing scheme to stem violence, extortion and arson attacks that continue to plague the state
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The ink has finally dried on KPMG dealmaker turned publican Jon Adgemis’ $400 million refinancing for Public Hospitality Group, which Street Talk began writing about 13 months ago.
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Three-quarters of Australians back wealth tax amid rising inequality
A survey has found most Australians support more action to rein in the ultra-rich as the G20 agreed to work on a 2 per cent levy on assets last week.
Around three-quarters of Australians support a tax on billionaires to curb rising inequality that has reached “obscene” levels, according to a recent survey.
In a YouGov poll commissioned by Oxfam, 74 per cent of respondents supported a tax on fortunes exceeding $50 million.
A further 76 per cent of respondents were concerned about the gap between ordinary Australians and the ultra-rich.
The survey, released last week, coincided with a Brazil-led meeting of G20 finance ministers and central bank governors in Rio de Janeiro.
Talks focused on a coordinated approach to tax avoidance, and a global tax to tip the economic scales away from billionaires akin to the OECD's pillar two plan for a minimum tax for multinationals.
“Inequality in Australia and across the globe has reached obscene levels, and until now governments have failed to protect people and planet from its catastrophic effects,” said Oxfam Australia chief executive Lyn Morgain.
“The richest one percent of humanity continues to fill their pockets while the rest are left to scrap for crumbs.”
Australian billionaires including mining magnates Gina Reinhart and Clive Palmer and Meriton founder Harry Triguboff consolidated their wealth by a total of $120 billion (or 71 per cent).l
We need to cap the ATO's access to personal data
The ATO’s continually growing powers, scrutiny of taxpayers, and access to taxpayer’s personal information has become an invasion of privacy.
The ATO's data-matching program is primarily designed to help the agency unmask taxpayers trying to ‘cheat’ the system by overclaiming in their tax return submissions, or those purposely delaying or ignoring payments altogether.
This focus on compliance has pushed the ATO to go above and beyond what the average Australian taxpayer would likely expect the lengths any service provider would take to ensure they pay on time. This includes collecting data from cryptocurrency designated service providers for up to one million individuals, accessing Service Australia records of 180,000 individuals to crackdown on false Medicare levy exemption claims, and accessing data from the likes of Amazon, eBay, Uber, Airbnb, insurance companies and investment providers.
The data being accessed by the ATO includes but is not limited to names, addresses, ABNs, dates of birth, contact numbers, email addresses, social media accounts, IP addresses, transaction data, loan information, payment methods, shipping addresses, government services entitlement details, trading histories, wallet addresses, financial transactions, vehicle registrations, visa records, tenant data and Australian Electoral Commission information.
And that’s far from a complete list. This extensive data collection goes far beyond what is typically expected, highlighting the ATO's broad reach into individuals' personal lives and financial activities.
The ATO’s capacity to protect our personal data deserves to be questioned
The fact that the government is able to access and leverage this personal information gathered from both the private and public sectors is concerning. Furthermore, consider the rapidly rising rate and complexity of cyber security threats to the Australian government and business ecosystem as a whole, alongside the government’s capacity to accurately manage the extensive data it already has at hand.
The ATO alone is managing over four million cyber attacks every month, highlighting the extensive lengths cyber criminals will go for the chance at accessing even one piece of personal information that millions of Australians are sharing with the ATO throughout the year.
Unfortunately, the ATO has proven its own systems are not flawless in their operations or accuracy. Most recently, the ATO's automated systems were found to be using faulty software that led to over a 1,000 wrong transactions. Many in the industry and those affected by the errors are now drawing comparisons to the robo-debt scheme, dubbing this debacle as ‘Robotax’.
