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Payroll tax distorts competition and penalises jobs

Imagine a tax payable by Myer, David Jones and JB Hi Fi that doesn’t apply to Harvey Norman. What about charging a tax to Footlocker but not Athlete’s Foot? Most extraordinary of all, what about charging this tax to grocery businesses like Harris Farm on the wages of hundreds of staff who unpack and sell fresh produce grown by Australian farmers but don’t charge that same tax to a Ferrari dealership with a handful of staff selling expensive imported sports cars. Surely Australia doesn’t do that. We’re not that stupid are we?

The not-so-level playing field

Actually, we are that stupid – it’s called payroll tax and it’s charged based on the total wages, above a threshold, of a company. In NSW, the rate is 5.45% of a business’s NSW wages above $750,000. Employers like the Ferrari dealer, with few staff, don’t pay and others providing many jobs, like the grocery shops, do. The grouping provisions of Australia’s payroll tax allow franchised businesses like Harvey Norman and Athlete’s Foot (and many others) to avoid the tax even though via their franchise agreement they are heavily ‘controlled’ by a single entity. In considering whether multiple employers are centrally controlled, the grouping provisions consider only ownership, instead of a wider sense of what entity is actually in control and how. Gerry Harvey has been pushing for a level GST playing field on overseas purchases but he won’t want a similar level playing field on payroll tax.

You can own Australia’s largest and most valuable hotel and not pay any payroll tax on the small staff needed to manage the investment. But the hotel management company who leases the building and runs the hotel has to pay payroll tax on the hundreds of jobs needed to serve the food, clean the rooms, and make the beds. Why do we make it cheaper to be a billionaire owner of a hotel but dearer for the hotel management company to provide these low skill, entry level jobs?

Thousands of entry level jobs were lost some years ago when Starbucks closed 100 of their 120 stores in Australia. No doubt it was partly because they were paying millions in payroll tax but their four-fold bigger direct competitor, Gloria Jeans, with 400 franchised stores, paid no payroll tax on store wages. Payroll tax costs jobs, many jobs.

Why favour capital over labour?

Australia is having a tax debate and supposedly, ‘everything is on the table’. If we are going to reform our tax system, let’s start with this distortionary tax that favours capital intensive business whilst penalising labour intensive business. It favours franchising by distorting competition between similar businesses based on their ownership structure. Providing lots of jobs should be celebrated and encouraged, not taxed and discouraged. Payroll tax should be completely abolished and the revenue replaced in another form that encourages employment and does not distort competition.

Eliminating payroll tax removes seven State taxes with the resultant massive removal of compliance and surveillance issues. Entire departments can be eliminated in every state giving significant savings and removal of duplication. If we are not going to eliminate payroll tax at least change it substantially so that it is not linked to the size of payroll. Link it to turnover, add it to GST, add it to company tax, do anything but don’t penalise job creation and don’t allow it to distort competition.

 

Peter Pitt is a Director at a leading national retailer. These opinions are his personal views and not necessarily those of his company.

 

5 Comments
SP
December 15, 2018

It is how payroll tax is computed that does not make any sense. Some companies outsourced entire call centers overseas and paid zero payroll tax on these payroll costs. Payroll costs should be based on overseas payroll costs and not local payroll costs so that companies will hire locals and not all wanting to outsource to cheaper countries.

Warren Bird
November 26, 2015

The economic incidence of payroll tax is identical to that of a value added tax like the GST. This is why Ken Henry's tax review back in 2010 discussed in the chapter on taxes on consumption.

The labour substitution effect that so many fear is a fallacy. It is not a tax on jobs!

All these arguments arise from confusing the legal incidence of payroll tax with its actual economic impact.

One of the best analyses of these matters was written by the NSW Treasury back in 1999. Here's a link to their paper, which is worth a read. http://www.treasury.nsw.gov.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0017/6650/TRP99-3_Pay_Roll_Tax.pdf

Paul Meleng
November 26, 2015

Payroll tax has to go. It blocks efficiencies. For example , in the USA there are labour aggregating services whereby you choose the employee ( not the labour hire firm) , but they are then "employed" by the service and hired to to you. THe service looks after all the payroll and employee benefits with massive efficiencies from the scale.. in admin, compliance, tax processing, IR, reporting, employee benefits, superannuation processing and so on, and the employees get the bulk buying that people in large orgs and unions etc can organise like travel discounts and health care deals. Employers like Doctors and Dentists and millions of others too small to have a professional HR manager don't have to get their head around all the zillions of beaurocratic "one off" knowledge bites. Payroll tax works against such efficiency.

ALL taxes on real productivity, income, work, innovation, trade , eduction, health care, food etc should go. According to the Henry report some 250 of the bloody things, gumming up the works and sapping the mental energy of the best and brightest. Almost all can be replaced easily with the appropriate level of land rent paid to the government of the people for the use of their common wealth. Add resource royalties, proper payment for environmental damage, user pays for government to business or not social services and the whole system would start to make sense. Good accounting would be used for business to business and management purposes and not for playing endless games with the nonsense ATO. And you cant shift land to a tax haven.

When you've paid your rent you've paid your tax.! I'd like to see that !

Alex Jones
November 26, 2015

Fair comment but payroll tax differences are small when comparing investments in companies within an industry.

Gary M
November 26, 2015

At a policy level, since small business is the largest aggregate employer, most employees don’t incur payroll tax for their boss, so it encourages small business. This is good since innovation, enterprise, productivity growth, etc generally come from small businesses, not institutions.

 

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