You're familiar, I'm sure, with the Double Irish Dutch Sandwich. It sounds tasty - but only to the big multinational companies that use it to avoid tax. According to the Assistant Treasurer David Bradbury in a speech he gave late last year, it's the device Google uses to pay very little Australian company tax on the profit it makes on an estimated $1 billion a year in Australian advertising revenue.
As Bradbury explains it (using media reports, he says, not inside information), the fine print of contracts Australian firms sign with Google says they're buying their advertising from an Irish subsidiary of Google.
Our rate of tax on company profits is 30 per cent, whereas Ireland's is 12.5 per cent. But that's just the start of the sandwich. The Irish subsidiary then pays a royalty payment to a Dutch subsidiary, but it's then paid back to a second Irish holding company of Google's, which is controlled in Bermuda - which has no company tax.
The media usually attribute the invention of the double Irish to Apple, Bradbury says. But evidence given to the British public accounts committee suggests Amazon paid no tax in Britain despite about $4.9 billion in sales by routing transactions through Luxembourg, where it faced an effective tax rate of 2.5 per cent.
The committee also heard that Starbucks had paid no tax in Britain for three years, despite sales totalling about $1.8 billion - in part because of royalty payments for the use of the brand.
With their government busy raising taxes and slashing government spending to get its budget deficit down, the Brits are pretty steamed up about multinationals not bearing their fair share of the tax burden. Governments in many developed countries are deciding tougher measures need to be taken to curb the multinationals' rorting of the system, and ours is no exception.
It's a problem governments have been grappling with for decades, of course, since the early days of globalisation and the rise of companies with operations in several countries. Then, the game was simply for multinationals to shift their profits to countries where taxes were low. One way to do this was for the part of the company where taxes were lower to sell its products to subsidiaries in high-tax developed countries at inflated prices. The big countries developed rules to limit such ''transfer pricing''.
Another trick was for a subsidiary to borrow from head office most of the capital it needed, with head office then charging an interest payment that absorbed most of the subsidiary's profits. Our ''thin capitalisation'' rule limits interest deductions to $3 of debt for each $1 of share capital, and there's talk this may be tightened in the budget.
In a speech he gave this month, Bradbury says you don't need to be doing business on the internet to use something like a double Irish scheme. ''What you do need is the global presence of a multinational enterprise and the ability to attribute a large part of your profits to intangible assets,'' he says.
And we know intangible assets - such as software, databases, patents, copyright and ''goodwill'' or ''brand value'' - play an increasingly important role in the global economy. In the United States, investment in intangible assets has exceeded investment in tangible assets for more than a decade.
Existing international legal arrangements rest heavily on the notion that income should be taxed in the country of its ''source''. When economic activity was dominated by farms, factories and mines, it usually wasn't hard to see that the source of income was where the factors of production were physically located.
But now ''the increasing importance of intangible capital to production challenges the very idea that we can always objectively determine where economic activity occurs,'' Bradbury says.
All this helps explain the emergence of ''stateless income'' - income that's not taxed in the source country of the production factors that gave rise to the income, nor in the ultimate parent company's jurisdiction. It's income that doesn't belong anywhere for tax purposes.
This, in turn, explains how the profits of US-controlled corporations in Luxembourg are equivalent to 18 per cent of its gross domestic product. For the Cayman Islands and Bermuda the proportions are more than 500 per cent and 600 per cent of those countries' gross domestic product.
Stateless income is not simply a product of transfer pricing abuses, but also arises from decisions about where to place financial capital within a multinational group. It involves exploiting differences in countries' tax systems and hybrid instruments treated as borrowings in a country and shares in another.
Tricks like these can place single-country businesses at a competitive disadvantage. They - and individual taxpayers - are forced to bear an unfair share of the tax burden. But many big-business executives reject the notion that paying a fair share of tax is part of a broader social compact. Tax is just another business cost. If dodging it is legal, morality doesn't enter into it.
The Gillard government is working to ensure our transfer-pricing rules are up with world's best practice and the general anti-avoidance provision of our tax act is broadened to encompass the tricks multinationals try on.
It has asked Treasury to study what more can be done, and will work to improve the information multinationals have to make public about profits and tax payments.
The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development has had to lift its game in promoting multilateral action to limit tax rorting by global companies.
