Friday 21 June 2019

SMH had a silly article about to earn $1m and pay no income tax

Apparently the SMH sub-editors have no qualms about using click-bait headlines such as "How a millionaire pays no income tax".

The article has some interesting facts about typical amounts deducted, drawn from ATO data on 2016/17 tax returns. But the main lead of the article is about the mythical 'Tony' who has a $1m income but pays no income tax. It turns out this hypothetical example is based on a) him making a $50K deductible contribution into super (of course these days the amount has reduced to $25K), and also making a whopping $850K charitable donation.

I suspect that most readers lured by the heading weren't expecting an article about how to pay no tax by giving all your earnings away as a charitable donation! ;)

Of more interest (but unexplained in the article) was the factino that the average amount claimed by those earning more than $1m income on 'managing tax affairs' was $607,201. It would be interesting to see if that much money was actually being spent on an arms-length basis.

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