Corporate tax dodgers - sign GetUp's senate submission

The senate is having an inquiry into corporate tax avoidance in Australia and is asking for submissions. GetUp has put together one and is asking for people to sign their name to it, thereby being one submission with thousands of signatures to give a unite voice to the senate from the community. Sign here. I've also put the submission here in it's entirety:

To the Senate Economics References Committee, 

This is a submission supported by thousands of individual Australians. 

We write to thank you for your work, and to reiterate the outrage that we feel as a community over the lack of concrete action to address corporate tax avoidance. 

The fact remains that our corporate tax watchdog, the Australian Taxation Office, has had its budget slashed and critical staff pushed out the door. Its audit team has dwindled in size and internally people at the ATO have questioned how they can really 'crack down' to recover the billions lost from corporate tax avoidance while their organisation is being gutted.1 

Despite the pledges of future action at the G20, there are a lot of things the Treasurer could be doing right this minute in line with international action to curtail corporate tax dodging. For example, there was a whole raft of corporate tax loopholes the Government kept open in 2013 — costing Australia $1 billion dollars.2 The Treasurer also recently abandoned an important anti-avoidance measure (by allowing deductions under section 25(90) of the Income Tax Assessment Act) in his Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, which was projected to recover $600 million alone.3 

Despite the fact that we're losing billions in tax revenue from the top 200 ASX companies each year (over half of them have subsidiaries in offshore tax havens), the Government is still refusing to support this Senate Inquiry into the extent of corporate tax avoidance in Australia.4 

Meanwhile, the least well off Australians are being asked to shoulder the biggest burden in the federal Budget – as the Government tries to remove income support for unemployed people, make higher education unaffordable through university fee deregulation, and hit the sick by cutting the Medicare rebate. The double standard is obvious. 

We hope that this inquiry will shine a light on both the immoral tax practices of multi-million dollar companies, and on the Government's disappointing inaction to help fix this problem, despite their strong rhetoric. 

Sincerely, 

XX,XXX GetUp members Sign