PwC, the other big four consultancies and the American Chamber of Commerce in Australia were among the entities that urged the federal government to delay and water down proposed multinational tax transparency laws.
Australia’s proposed country-by-country reporting would make it a world leader in tax transparency, compelling multinationals to publish detailed location-specific information about their revenue, expenses and effective tax rate to deter profit shifting and tax avoidance.
The laws were delayed by 12 months and are now due to start in July 2024. Submissions produced to the Senate in June reveal the Albanese government faced calls for further delay, reduction in the scope of information to be published and less detail about country-by-country operations.
In April, PwC warned Treasury the proposal would impose a “considerable compliance burden” on multinationals, outweighing “incremental benefits” to disclosure.
“The scope of disclosures are significant, unique in cases and go well beyond any currently mandated public CBC reporting regimes globally,” it said.
PwC called for the measure to be delayed until at least July 2025 or at least July 2026 “where disclosures go beyond existing public reporting regimes”.
The EU’s rules only require reporting on EU member states and tax havens, a model which PwC recommended, meaning that “disclosure for all other states would be aggregated”.
Jason Ward, the principal analyst of the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research, said under EU rules corporate financial information “is aggregated as one useless lump sum” for non-member states.
“It’s no wonder that PwC and its multinational clients are pushing Australia towards alignment with the European Union’s weak and flawed approach to public country-by-country reporting,” he said.
“This does not expose rampant multinational profit shifting. It merely encourages …the existing schemes to be moved from Luxembourg and Ireland to Switzerland, Singapore or dozens of other jurisdictions.”
Ward said “intense corporate lobbying … is a clear demonstration that multinationals want to keep the public in the dark”. “What is so secret about basic financial information on a country-by-country basis?”
PwC said it was a “strong supporter of meaningful transparency in our taxation system”. But it warned “there are significant concerns relating to confidential and legally prohibited information being published”.
In January it was revealed that the former head of international tax for PwC Australia Peter-John Collins had been deregistered by the Tax Practitioners Board for sharing confidential information from a government multinational tax consultation, a matter that has been referred to the federal police.
Deloitte submitted that Australia should align its regime with the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, ditching plans to require “additional or different data”.
It called for an exemption for groups “with a limited presence in Australia”, a recommendation supported by PwC, which wants a threshold for “materiality” of a company’s operations in Australia.
EY said the rules represented “overreach”, extending “well beyond information necessary to protect Australia’s income base”, which it said was not reasonable or proportional.
The American Chamber of Commerce in Australia noted the OECD already provides “large volumes of data” and as a result the “tax gap for large corporates” is “relatively small”.
It said the benefit of the proposal was “questionable” as it is “not an effective mechanism to ensure compliance with Australian laws”.
“In fact, the 2023-24 federal budget largely ignores this measure when discussing increased revenue. We agree. This measure will not collect tax.”
The assistant treasurer, Andrew Leigh, said the government had delayed the measure once because firms had warned they would incur a “significant expense” to comply with Australia’s rules a year earlier than similar measures in the EU.
Leigh said Australia is looking to “alignment with the EU”, particularly to ensure Australia is not “cut off from the international exchange of tax information from other countries”, which would “adversely impact the [Australian Taxation Office] getting what it needs”.
“We want the maximum transparency possible, while avoiding anything that might harm the effectiveness of the ATO as a watchdog.”
Leigh said he had a “strong personal commitment” to tax transparency but it would be “silly” to ignore the possibility that countries or entities – believed to include the US and the OECD – might provide Australia less information depending on how the scheme is enacted. “We need to test those arguments.”
In June Guardian Australia revealed that SwissHoldings, representing 62 Swiss-based multinationals, including the food giant Nestlé and the pharmaceutical company Roche, had suggested its members may rethink their local operations if the rules went ahead.
