If Lendlease tax whistleblower goes down in court while the Tax Office continues to dither for more than four years enforcing its ‘double dipping’ rules against the property giant, the question could well be asked, why would anybody do the right thing and blow the whistle again? Michael West reports.
If there were any further proof required that, to bastardise the words of George Orwell, all animals are equal in the taxation zoo, but some animals are less equal than others, look no further than Lendlease. Oh, and its advisers PwC.
The Tax Office has been dithering for 5 years over Lendlease’s 2018 tax return but try being a small business, a non-multinational, failing to get your return in by October for the year to June 2023 … and see how you go.
In fact, this writer is just in receipt of a warning that wages reporting now has to be filed monthly, rather than quarterly, thereby catapulting that compliance workload by a factor of three times. Mind you, it might be a sensible cashflow initiative nonetheless, but you get the picture, there is one rule for the powerful and another for the rest of us.
To get to the point, the man who blew the whistle to the ATO on Lendlease’s $1b ‘double-dipping’ scheme now has his house on the line fighting under the flawed whistleblower protection laws in the courts. He awaits judgement in a game where he is personally funding his case, and our superannuation is funding the corporate defence.
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