News

Apple, Chevron and JP Morgan targeted in new Get Up! TV campaign on tax avoidance

Activist group Get Up! will tomorrow launch a national TV campaign centred around the idea that individual taxpayers pay more local tax than some big corporations.

The new campaign highlights how the likes of tech giant Apple paid only a little over 1% per tax on almost $6bn in total revenues in Australia, last year, and aims to raise pressure on the Coalition to reform the tax laws.

Get Up! campaigns director Natalie O’Brien said multinational corporations were deliberately inflating their losses to shifting their profits overseas. 

“Big corporations have been flogging our schools and hospitals of essential funding for years,” said O’Brien. “That’s why any new revenue from corporate tax reform needs to be invested in our health and education systems.

“A tightening of corporate tax laws is tipped to feature in the May budget, but how far reforms go, and to what extent they’re offset by a big corporate tax handout, remains to be seen.”

The two commercials highlight the impact of tax avoidance on essential services like health and educations and features individual taxpayers making statements like: “I pay more tax than J.P. Morgan.”

The commercials will run on national television in the lead up to the Federal Budget, and was funded by more than 2000 donations individual Australians.

“We’ll be keeping a close eye on who is best served by Mr Turnbull’s first budget – everyday Australians, or billionaire corporations and the wealthiest 1%,” she said.

A Get Up! report on tax avoidable found 76 companies who the group claimed had collectively reduced their tax bill by $5.37bn in 2013 and 2014.

A spokeswoman for Apple has responded to the campaign claiming that Get Up! was being “misleading”,and noting that while the tech giant did have revenues of $6bn its taxable income was far less at only $247.3m.

Apple paid tax of $74.1m on that $247.3m in taxable revenue however, it was last year accused of deliberately minimising its local taxable through a tax structure known as “double Irish sandwich with dutch affiliations” in which it used of a combination of Irish and Dutch subsidiary companies to shift profits to low or no tax jurisdictions.

During a Senate inquiry, last year, Apple’s vice president of South Asia & Australia/NZ told the committee: “we book all of our revenue and sales that we do in Australia in our books locally.”

“We book all of the costs associated with doing business here and we buy our products from companies in the Apple affiliate group and we pay tax on all of our sales here in Australia.”

Nic Christensen 

ADVERTISEMENT

Get the latest media and marketing industry news (and views) direct to your inbox.

Sign up to the free Mumbrella newsletter now.

 

SUBSCRIBE

Sign up to our free daily update to get the latest in media and marketing.