Despite cashing in the big bucks, some of the world's largest IT companies continued to avoid paying any tax in Australia during the 2018-19 financial year, according to the Australian Taxation Office's (ATO) latest corporate tax transparency report.
The sixth annual transparency report[1], which covers the tax affairs of the largest companies operating in Australia, revealed those tech companies that escaped from paying anything included IBM Australia and New Zealand, which had a taxable income of AU$60 million on revenue of AU$3.26 billion.
Unisys and Toshiba Australia were also marked as companies that paid no tax last year.
NEC Australia and SAP Australia had zero taxable income, despite revenues reaching AU$405 million and AU$1.16 billion, respectively. Both companies recorded losses during FY19, where NEC Australia reduced headcount[2] and SAP suffered a total loss of AU$20.4 million[3].
The ATO said "the proportion of companies that have paid no income tax remains steady at 32% in 2018-19 in comparison to 2017-18".
At the same time, the report revealed a majority of tech companies did right by the country's tax system, making payments at the corporate tax rate of 30%. These companies included Microsoft, Facebook, Apple, Samsung Electronics, Amazon Web Services, Cisco, Dell, Equinix, and Huawei Australia.
Telstra paid the most tax when it came to total dollar value, handing the ATO a sum of AU$863 million on a taxable income of AU$2.97 billion from revenue of AU$26.6 billion.
Atlassian also decided to pay tax this year, a change from the previous three consecutive years where it had paid zilch. The company's tax bill came in at AU$11 million on taxable income of AU$56.8 million, after cashing in AU$1.54 billion in revenue in 2018-19. Despite paying up, Atlassian only paid an effective