Microsoft’s Australian data-centre business brought in $2.3 billion last financial year and paid no income tax. Optus owner Singtel took in $8.3 billion and paid none. Energy retailer AGL earned $13.1 billion and paid none. The Ichthys LNG project near Darwin made $9.7 billion and paid none. Those figures are from the tax office’s own 2024-25 transparency data, published on October 1.
They are not the exceptions. 1,149 of the 4,299 largest companies in Australia, every one with at least $100 million in income here, paid no income tax at all. The company tax rate is 30%.
How you earn billions and owe nothing
Brazilian meat giant JBS took in more than $4.8 billion and paid nothing, as it does year after year. Adani’s Carmichael coal mine has never paid tax since it opened in 2021. Fonterra ($2.4 billion), Sony Australia ($1.6 billion) and Kogan ($642 million) paid nothing either.
The tech giants that do pay, pay crumbs. Netflix paid $8.4 million on $1.4 billion in Australian revenue: 0.6%. TikTok paid $17.3 million on $686.6 million. Microsoft’s software business paid $160.6 million on more than $9.2 billion, under 2%.
The method is no secret. The local company pays its own overseas affiliates for the brand, the software or the marketing, and those payments wipe out the Australian profit. “You just put your intellectual property in a tax haven jurisdiction, and rather than book the value of the sale in Australia, it’s essentially shifted to somewhere else,” Jason Ward of the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability and Research told the Guardian. “Sadly, it’s pretty easy to do.” For resource companies the destination is Singapore: sell the coal or gas to your own subsidiary there and book the profit where the tax is lighter. The tax office says it is watching for exactly this, “big payments to related party offshore” that cut the profit taxed in Australia.
The “mining downturn” excuse
Total tax from these companies fell $8.2 billion this year, to $87.5 billion, and the tax office put most of that down to lower commodity prices squeezing miners. Santos makes that explanation hard to swallow. It paid no company tax in any year from 2013-14 to 2023-24, on nearly $47 billion in sales. That run includes the years after Russia invaded Ukraine in 2022, when gas prices soared and the industry made windfall profits. In 2023-24 alone Santos sold $8.2 billion of gas and paid nothing. Ichthys LNG paid nothing for six straight years on $43 billion in sales.
A company that paid no tax through the biggest gas boom in a generation is not paying no tax because of a downturn.
The excuses
The tax office says “a nil tax result doesn’t automatically imply wrongdoing.” Microsoft says it pays all tax required under Australian laws. Optus has said its zero tax is down to infrastructure investment and operating expenses. Each of those can be true, and that is the problem: the law lets a company take billions out of Australia and leave nothing behind. Singtel was a regular taxpayer here until 2020. Its customers didn’t stop paying their bills. It stopped paying tax.
A nurse can’t book their wages to a subsidiary in Singapore. These companies can, and they are getting away with it. The tax office has written a ruling aimed at profit shifting by tech companies, and it is expected to face legal challenges. Expect the companies that pay nothing to spend heavily on lawyers to keep it that way.
Further Reading
- Billions of dollars, none of it taxed: ATO reveals the tech giants paying zero income tax, the Guardian’s company-by-company reading of the ATO data.
- ATO says 1,149 large companies paid no tax as it scrutinises AI firms, ABC News on the full report and what the tax office says it is watching.
- Santos records nearly $47bn in sales over a decade without paying corporate tax, The Point on Santos and Ichthys LNG.