The Tax Office is watching

John Jamieson writes: Re. “The tax man is watching: new surveillance force for ATO” (Thursday). As a small business owner living in a rural area in the south-west of Western Australia, I have been watching all the convoluted schemes set up by corporations and the various  methods being used to evade and dodge payment of tax on a massive scale. The whole of the Corporations Law, set up by big international firms of lawyers and accountants, with their lackeys who call themselves “politicians”, have been perpetrating shonky arrangements ever since the days of the Rum Corps in New South Wales. Nothing ever gets done to track down these global pirates and bring them to account, as our system has been so cleverly infiltrated by their lobbyists and paid hacks that our surveillance agencies have no teeth.

Every now and then we hear of a “drug bust” or a company being fined for breaking some rather insignificant part of the employment laws, or avoiding paying an apprentice their superannuation, but nothing is done about the billions being laundered around and the third-world countries (called “tax havens”) where these “corporate entities” have kept their earnings and huge profits out of the public’s eyes. In the meantime, we see all kinds of nonsense being presented as “tax reform”, whilst completely avoiding adoption of the real reforms that people like Ken Henry wanted to introduce.