The AFR had nowadays - labelled "Exclusive" - that must be among the worst beat-up jobs I have ever seen. Just rubbish.

So here could be the background rolex imitation :The ATO had to refund a tax payment right after the federal court ruled against the ATO inside a tax dispute. This will be an unremarkable story except for two elements:

To place this story into context the ATO supplies tax refunds all the time if tax has been over-paid.

So what occurred here? In 2000 and 2001 News booked a $2 billion loss following a series of paper transactions. The ATO disallowed the tax deduction and consequently collected much more tax income than it otherwise would have. News went to court and won and so the ATO has had to refund the tax revenue it had collected with interest.

The Fairfax spin of that set of unremarkable information is astonishing.

The single biggest aspect inside the underlying deterioration of your federal price range announced by Treasurer Joe Hockey in December was a money payout of pretty much $900 million to Rupert Murdoch's News Corporation.

Notice the use of the operate "underlying". When you don't know what to appear for you'd think that the ATO refunding funds it had legal entitlement to was some kind of rort. The point is that the government claims to utilize accrual accounting for budget purposes. If it did actually use accrual accounting that $882 million would have already been a contingent liability around the governments books. The repayment from the $882 million could be charged against the years when the income was collected. It can be correct that it represents a decline the state on the price range on a money basis (i.e. underlying) and that is definitely what the AFR wants us to concentrate on.*

The Tax Office was deciding irrespective of whether to appeal against the judgment as News Corp newspapers launched a ferocious attack on the government, rolex swiss replicas kicking off with the Each day Telegraph's headline on August 5, 11 days right after the court judgment:"Kick this mob out." Within the following days best replica watches paypal , Labor leader Kevin Rudd would claim that News Corp was operating a virulent anti-government campaign in exchange for concessions in the Coalition.

Unbelievable. Are we seriously to know that the News Corp papers campaigned against probably the most useless government in contemporary history just so that the ATO would not appeal a federal court ruling? To prevent that kind of political corruption with the tax program is why the Tax Commissioner in (nominally) independent of government. Winning a case against the ATO in court is hardly a "concession" - a miracle perhaps, but never a concession. When personal taxpayers get a tax refund at the end from the year it is never ever a "concession".

A really poor effort by the AFR.