Re: No speedrail, Badgerys creek or Kurnell

["Dave Proctor" <daproc@spambait.ozemail.com.au>]

<presterjohn16@my-deja.com> wrote in message
917894$76$1@nnrp1.deja.com">news:917894$76$1@nnrp1.deja.com...
> The trouble with tax concessions, and the reason Treasury and the ATO
> hate them, is that they are a bottomless pit.
>
> I used to police the R&D Tax Concession, including the infamous R&D
> Syndication scheme, which was probably a rort the size of the bottom-of-
> the-harbour schemes, in what it finally cost the taxpayer.  You won't
> ever hear it get the Four Corners expose it deserves though- too many
> Labor and Liberal MPs were involved with various of the 'R&D projects'.
>
> The problem is that the consultants will try to fit every item of
> expenditure under the particular head of expenditure which gets the
> concession. So in the R&D scheme we had the government paying for large
> chunks of machinery that needed some fine tuning to get them to work.
> The machinery cost was an eligible part of the 'R&D' project.

And that is what I do not understand.

My understanding of the "tax concession" scheme is that if a business earns
a profit of (to pluck a figure out of thin air) $10 million dollars, and is
thereofre subject to income tax of $4.9 million, that $4.9 million is
waived. Which is ok, because if the scheme had not gone ahead, the profit
would never have been made in the first place, so the $4.9 million in income
tax would never ever have been owing to the government.

The $4.9 million is instead used to repay the debt of the enterprise, thus
ensuring it reaches true profitability that much earlier.

I cannot see how this is a bad thing.

Dave