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Uber loses court battle against Australia Tax Office

• bamboozled 10y ago
  This makes good sense to me, Uber drivers contribute to degredation of expensive infrastructure (roads) and will also contribute to pollution (noise, air, run off into waterways), affecting the the host country in which Uber is conducting business. Therefore, it makes sense that anyone making a profit from such services should be giving back to the hosting community, just like anyone else running a business would have too.
• crdb 10y ago
  What would make sense would be to tax the 20% cut that Uber (the company that makes >$75,000/year in revenue) is taking from the rides (see any discussion of what exactly is GMV). Then, if an individual driver does make more than the threshold, he'd also lose his GST exemption. This would be a fair and correct application of the existing legislation that takes into account that drivers are self-employed and that Uber is a large company. I like that Australia is attempting to maintain the rule of law, but Uber has a point: if they are to be treated like taxis they ought to have all the privileges of taxis, including street pickups. This particular solution sounds more like the government wants a certain outcome and is bending the rules to achieve it, which is in the long term damaging to the rule of law. If the issue is one of implementation (such as the government being technically incapable or legally barred from doing a simple SQL query to determine revenue per driver in a financial year) then they should outright say so.