Newscorp is the only remaining company in this Australian Tax Office risk group, the group described as "Q1". It basically means that they don't hold discussions with the tax office in real time throughout the year as to what they're doing, but agressively avoid tax and leave it up to the tax office to find out what they've done after the event and to investigate.
Other companies were in that high risk Q1 category, but simply by changing their attitude and talking openly with the ATO throughout the year have been removed from that list.
At the Senate inquiry ATO officers compared the behaviour of the remaining Q1 company with the 12 companies which were moved to the lower-risk Q2 category, which held Australia's 68 biggest companies, each of which had more than $5 billion a year in sales.
"It was actually a behavioural change from those companies," Deputy Commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn said.
"They started coming to us before the event and talking to us about what they were doing rather than us working out what they had done after the event and trying to investigate."
This was part of a proactive policy the Tax Office has developed with large companies.
"So we go out and we talk to them about the deals that they are doing in their business throughout the year so that when they go to file their return we know what is going to be in that return," Deputy Commissioner Michael Konza said.
The Tax Office uses this process with the 68 large companies in Q2 to flag problem areas which need a ruling or special attention. But News Corp has refused such contacts.
"They have said, 'We are not required to talk to you before we file a tax return,' and they are right," Mr Konza said of the unnamed Q1 company.
"We say, 'If you don't want to co-operate in that manner, then you can expect that we're going to have to do audits and reviews on you all the time, because we won't have any other way of seeing things'," Mr Konza said. more
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