Australia yesterday said it had slapped seven large multinationals with a multibillion-dollar tax bill as it pursued global firms shifting profits offshore to minimize liabilities.
The companies hit with the A$2.9 billion (US$2.2 billion) bill were not named although miner Rio Tinto PLC late on Wednesday said it was required by the Australian Tax Office (ATO) to pay an additional tax of A$447 million, including interest.
The government said four of the companies were involved in e-commerce and three in the energy and resource sectors. Companies including Apple Inc, Google and BHP Billiton Ltd were grilled at parliamentary hearings on their tax structures in 2015.
“Our multinational tax laws are having an impact and we now have one of the toughest, if not the toughest, anti-avoidance tax regimes in the world,” Australian Treasurer Scott Morrison said in a statement.
Canberra has vowed to crack down on tax avoidance by multinationals, introducing new laws that included stronger protections for whistle-blowers and harsher penalties for failure to meet compliance or disclosure requirements.
The Australian Tax Office is carrying out 71 audits on 59 global firms, with about 1,000 officers part of a taskforce investigating companies’ tax arrangements, the government said.
It expects some of the seven companies issued with tax bills to settle their accounts, while others were likely to take the claims to court.
Rio Tinto said it would challenge the amended tax assessments, which relate to the pricing of transactions between the firm’s entities in Australia and its marketing hub in Singapore, “but will pay 50 percent of the total amount to the ATO this month.”
“The amended assessments do not relate to any tax avoidance schemes as confirmed by the Australian Tax Office. No penalties are payable,” it said in a statement.
“Rio Tinto considers that its pricing is in accordance with the internationally recognised OECD [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development] guidelines and Australian domestic law,” it said.
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Nvidia Corp CEO Jensen Huang (黃仁勳) on Thursday met with US President Donald Trump at the White House, days before a planned trip to China by the head of the world’s most valuable chipmaker, people familiar with the matter said. Details of what the two men discussed were not immediately available, and the people familiar with the meeting declined to elaborate on the agenda. Spokespeople for the White House had no immediate comment. Nvidia declined to comment. Nvidia’s CEO has been vocal about the need for US companies to access the world’s largest semiconductor market and is a frequent visitor to China.
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