The Australian tax authorities have released some interesting data about the biggest corporate (non) taxpayers in an Excel format. It’s raw data ready for extra calculations, charts and PivotTables.
Another example of how publicly available data can be used by anyone to dig into previously obscure areas using Excel tools.
The “Corporate Tax Transparency” report from the Australian Taxation Office can be downloaded as an Excel file for the 2013-2016 tax years.
In this case, see Aussie companies that have amazing accounting. Take Woolworth’s, one of the country’s largest supermarket chains who have almost $50 billion total income but only 4% is taxable. Or Pomi Pty Ltd which brings in over $6 billon of income but less than a million is taxable, leaving them to pay a mere $287,000 in tax, presumably out of petty cash.
Many of the 2,000 plus companies listed paid no tax at all or had no taxable income. Many #DIV/0! errors in calculations.
Get the worksheet from here, open in Excel then sort, filter and massage the data to your nerdy delight. We quickly added columns to show the percentage of tax paid and the proportion of taxable income to total income.
Doubtless it’s all creative, but legal, accounting.
