The Senate Economics References Committee Corporate tax avoidance Part I You cannot tax what you cannot see August 2015 © Commonwealth of Australia 2015 ISBN 978-1-76010-274-6 This work is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivs 3.0 Australia License. The details of this licence are available on the Creative Commons website: http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/3.0/au/ Printed by the Senate Printing Unit, Parliament House, Canberra. Senate Economics References Committee Members Senator Sam Dastyari (Chair) New South Wales, ALP Senator Sean Edwards (Deputy Chair) South Australia, LP Senator Matthew Canavan Queensland, NATS Senator the Hon. Kim Carr (until 15 May 2015) Victoria, ALP Senator Chris Ketter Queensland, ALP Senator Jenny McAllister (from 15 May 2015) New South Wales, ALP Senator Nick Xenophon South Australia, IND Senators participating in this inquiry Senator Richard Di Natale Victoria, AG Senator Christine Milne (until 10 August 2015) Tasmania, AG Senator Peter Whish-Wilson Tasmania, AG Secretariat Dr Kathleen Dermody, Secretary Mr Alan Raine, Principal Research Officer Ms Morana Kavgic, Administrative Officer (until 27 February 2015) Ms Ashlee Hill, Administrative Officer (from 23 February 2015) PO Box 6100 Parliament House Canberra ACT 2600 Ph: 02 6277 3540 Fax: 02 6277 5719 E-mail:
[email protected] Internet: www.aph.gov.au/senate_economics iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Membership of Committee iii Executive Summary ..........................................................................................vii Background to the interim report ......................................................................... vii Recommendations .................................................................................................. viii Evidence of tax avoidance and aggressive minimisation .................................... viii Multilateral efforts to combat tax avoidance and aggressive minimisation ........ viii Potential areas of unilateral action to protect Australia's revenue base ...............