The AFR’s Joe Aston has continued his stellar reporting of JobKeeper rorting by Australian companies:
On Wednesday, listed trucking company K&S Corporation released its full-year accounts, helpfully breaking out the nearly $30 million of JobKeeper it banked in calendar 2020, only $344,000 of which topped up stood-down workers (remember, trucking has been uninterrupted by the pandemic).
The rest padded its burgeoning profits and funded a $19 million increase in the dividend. We’ve now heard hundreds of versions of this same story…
It has never been explained how or why JobKeeper did not include clawback provisions. The longstanding principle of a “true-up” – where estimates provided by beneficiaries are later reconciled to final actual amounts – is a central tenet of both the taxation and social security systems (even Stuart “Robodebt” Robert understood that).
When the Commonwealth has overpaid you, it raises a debit in your tax return. It’s rudimentary.
And that’s because it can’t be explained. It was an amateur failure of [JobKeeper] policy architecture that has cost taxpayers the equivalent of the annual Defence budget. In 26 weeks flat!…
The awful truth is that Frydenberg left the Commonwealth vault open…
NIB Holdings was also outed by The AFR as making bank from JobKeeper:
NIB Holdings has been on “a bit of a tear”.
Its share price trajectory is a picture of health. Underlying profit is up 62 per cent. Its 24¢ fully franked yearly dividend is the highest in its history…
Also helpful: about $3.8 million in federal debt-funded JobKeeper to the company’s travel insurance division…
Labor is once again pressing for greater transparency regarding the JobKeeper scheme, with a proposal to disclose companies with turnover of more than $10m that benefited from JobKeeper. Shadow assistant treasurer Andrew Leigh notes that countries such as the US and the UK publicly disclosed companies that received payments under similar wage subsidy schemes, but there is no such level of transparency in Australia:
Attaching an amendment to laws designed to shut down offshore banking units on Tuesday night, Labor believes the list will reveal further waste in the $90 billion scheme…
Dr Leigh said disclosures to the corporate regulator were the only transparency available related to JobKeeper.
“The American, British and New Zealand wage subsidy programs had transparency around them. Under each one of those programs the public knew every single recipient.
“You can’t get that information in Australia because Scott Morrison and Josh Frydenberg run the most secretive government in Australian history.”
Liberal Assistant Treasurer Michael Sukkar claims Labor is playing politics to discredit JobKeeper:
“Once again Labor has proved why it cannot be trusted to run the economy.”
It’s funny how fiscal conservatism and ‘mutual obligation’ only applies to the unemployed. But when it comes to egregious corporate welfare, the Coalition’s army of fiscal hawks suddenly fall silent.
