ATO Releases 2021-22 Corporate Tax Transparency Report

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) have published its ninth annual report on corporate tax transparency, which provides the 2021–22 tax information of 2,713 large corporate entities who paid a total of $83.8 billion income tax.

This year’s report analyses aggregated data from the 2021–22 income tax returns of some of the largest corporations operating in Australia. It describes changes and trends in key headline figures for the population, as well as data by industry segment and ownership group.

The corporate tax transparency population includes:

Australian public and foreign-owned corporate tax entities with total income of $100 million or more;
Australian-owned resident private companies with total income of $200 million or more;
entities that have petroleum resource rent tax (PRRT) payable.

Key findings

There are 2,713 entities in this year’s population, representing a net increase of 245 entities (9.9%) on 2020–21.
Total income for 2021–22 was $2,630.6 billion, an increase of 14.7%.
Taxable income was $341.4 billion, an increase of 33.1%.
Tax payable was $83.8 billion, an increase of 22.2%.
Foreign-owned entities accounted for 55.1% of this year’s corporate transparency population and 28.3% of tax payable.
Australian public entities accounted for 21.7% of this year’s corporate transparency population and 60.2% of tax payable.
Australian private entities accounted for 23.1% of this year’s corporate transparency population and nearly 11.5% of tax payable.
Entities with income of more than $5 billion represented 2.9% of the corporate transparency population and accounted for 57.0% of tax payable ($47.8 billion).
Entities with income of between $250 million and $5 billion represented the largest portion (56.5%) of the corporate transparency population and accounted for 38.1% of the tax payable ($31.9 billion).
Medium entities – those with income of less than $250 million – represented 40.6% of the corporate transparency population and accounted for only 4.9% of the tax payable ($4.1 billion).
Tax payable in the corporate transparency population was again dominated by the Mining, Energy and Water segment at 50.6% ($42.4 billion) of the total. This year the Mining, Energy and Water segment increased by $10.2 billion (31.6%) on last year.
Approximately 31% of entities paid nil tax (12% incurred an accounting loss, 7% incurred a tax loss, 2% utilised offsets, 10% utilised tax losses from prior year).
PRRT payable increased 115.6% from $926.0 million last year to $1,996.6 million this year.