Netflix: What’s the Scam? – Michael West

You can watch this latest Netflix fantasy for just $41, the price of its financial statements from the corporate regulator ASIC.

What’s the scam? Netflix’s 2020 fantasy accounts show revenue in Australia of just $20.5m. If you assume their 12m subscribers here pay a basic rate of $10 a month, that’s $1.4bn in revenue. So what happened to this $1.4bn?

Netflix and its co-conspirator EY are “doing a Google”, that is, the caper Google used to rely on to pay zero tax before it was forced to resort to another scam. They just book their income here to an associate offshore and the minuscule amount of income they book here is “service” fees from Netflix in the Netherlands and the US.

Tax seeped in at just $581k. They claim they…