Commonwealth Bank pays its tax. The ASX pays its tax. Magellan pays its tax. But for every hero there are many villains. According to Michael West Media, Transurban Holdings has averaged over $2.5 billion in revenue per year for 11 years and paid zero corporate income tax. Sydney Airport Corporation generated over $1 billion a year and also paid zero. DP World went a full decade without a single tax payment. You probably suspected some of that instinctively. Now there’s a tool that lets you see it in black and white.
Michael West Media just launched TAXDATA.
TAXDATA is a free, searchable database covering 11 years of ATO corporate tax transparency data, from 2014 to 2024, across 1,274 companies. Every company pulling more than $100 million in annual revenue is in there: total income, taxable income, tax payable. Three columns that tell you everything you need to know about who’s contributing and who’s taking Australian revenue and skipping their obligations.
The tool was built in collaboration with Associate Professor Roman Lanis and Dr Mikhail Shashnov at the University of Technology Sydney, Jason Ward from the Centre for International Corporate Tax Accountability & Research (CICTAR), and Dr Mark Zirnsak from the Tax Justice Network Australia. These aren’t activists with a blog. Lanis is a globally cited tax accounting academic. Ward’s research has been referenced in parliamentary inquiries. This is serious infrastructure for public accountability.
Why this matters right now
Australia is about to become a global leader in multinational tax transparency. New legislation will require multinational corporations earning at least $10 million in Australian revenue to publicly disclose detailed tax data, not just here, but across 40 known tax havens including Switzerland, Singapore and Hong Kong. When that data starts flowing in the coming months, TAXDATA will be one of the few places equipped to make sense of it.
That’s the thing about raw government data dumps. The ATO publishes its corporate tax transparency report annually, and it lands with a quiet thud. The numbers are there, technically public, but buried in formats that nobody outside a parliamentary research team is going to wade through. Michael West Media has been doing the actual journalism on this data for years, naming names and showing patterns that the raw numbers alone don’t reveal.
Independent journalism doing heavy lifting
Michael West is a Walkley Award winning financial journalist, ex-Fairfax, who founded Michael West Media in 2016 to cover stories the mainstream press largely ignores. The publication runs no commercial advertising. It survives on reader support and maintains editorial independence that allows it to publish investigations into the very corporations that fund mainstream media through advertising spend.
There’s a structural problem in Australian media that doesn’t get discussed enough. The companies most aggressively minimising their tax obligations are often the same companies buying full-page ads in the papers that should be investigating them. Michael West Media operates outside that conflict entirely, which is why it can name the biggest tax dodgers in the country without a nervous phone call from the advertising team.
Use it
The ATO’s Tax Avoidance Taskforce has generated $25.1 billion for the Commonwealth as at 30 June 2025, including $5.2 billion in the last financial year alone. That’s real money, clawed back through enforcement funded by relatively modest government investment. Public scrutiny accelerates that process. When citizens, journalists and researchers can see the data clearly, it creates democratic pressure that no amount of corporate lobbying can fully neutralise.
Go to taxdata.michaelwest.com.au, search for a company, and see what they actually pay. Then consider that this resource was built by an independent newsroom running on reader donations while the institutions with actual budgets looked the other way.
The first step to fixing corporate tax avoidance is making it visible. TAXDATA does exactly that.
Sources: