Many large corporate groups consist of smaller entities whose aggregated total income meets the transparency population income thresholds. If these entities are not consolidated for tax purposes, some or all of the entities may not individually meet the income thresholds for inclusion in the report.
The complexity and diversity of large corporate groups means that the corporation's income may be distributed and returned by multiple entities within an economic group, this can change the nil tax paid percentages when the entire group is taken into consideration, this is explained in more detail in the nil tax section.
It is important to note that the aggregate figures in this report cannot reflect the:
- complexity of the tax system
- relationships between entities
- calculations behind the numbers
- extent and nature of any ATO activity.
Corporate tax transparency reports are our analysis of the tax return data published in the annual Report of entity tax information at data.gov.au. The latest dataset can be accessed at 2019–20 Report of entity tax informationExternal Link. Prior year data can be accessed at data.gov.auExternal Link. While some names listed in the Report of entity tax information may be recognisable to the public and connections to high-profile individuals may be the subject of public knowledge, confidentiality provisions of the tax law prevent us from disclosing some information.
This means we cannot include details of the income and tax paid by other related entities. Corporations are, of course, able to disclose additional information at their own discretion – for example, through the Voluntary Tax Transparency Code. Voluntary Tax Transparency Code reports can be accessed at data.gov.auExternal Link.
Entities subject to the $100 million income threshold include:
- foreign-owned entities – those with a reported foreign shareholding on the company tax return of greater than 50%
- Australian public entities.
Entities subject to the $200 million threshold include Australian-owned resident private companies. For simplicity, we also refer to these entities as Australian private entities.
Caution needs to be taken when comparing the ownership cohorts, as they are not directly comparable. For example, Australian private companies will be under-represented in counts because of the different income reporting thresholds.
It should also be noted that if an entity has a tax loss, we cannot publish the amount of the loss in the Report of entity tax information. For this reason, the data only includes positive taxable income amounts or a blank field. However, in this report we calculate taxable income at the aggregate level including tax losses. This can create differences in taxable income totals between the two reports.
Figures in this report have generally been rounded, which may result in differences between totals and sums of components in the charts and text.