‘…Nowhere man sitting in his nowhere land’: The continuing saga of cross border arbitrage

Abstract

The media in Australia clamours about reports that Google pays a very small tax bill on their income of several hundreds of millions of dollars. The perceived ‘failure’ of Australia’s tax laws to capture income/gains that it was believed should have been taxed in Australia, has been much criticised. This article discusses the problems, which include inadequate domestic residence and source ‘rules’; cross border domestic residence and source ‘rules’ mis-matches; and domestic courts’ encountering in the omestic transfer pricing legislation.