MAAL (Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law, Australia)
The Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law is an Australian anti-avoidance law, in force from 1 January 2016, aimed at foreign multinationals with annual global income above A$1bn that arrange their affairs to avoid attributing profit to an Australian permanent establishment. It applies where a foreign entity supplies goods or services to Australian customers, does related work in Australia, and has structured things, for the principal purpose of avoiding Australian tax, so that no Australian taxable presence is triggered. The MAAL lets the ATO treat those Australian activities as a taxable presence and assess the diverted profit. It runs alongside Australia's separate Diverted Profits Tax, introduced in 2017.
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Example: an offshore platform with a large Australian sales team books its contracts overseas to avoid an Australian taxable presence; the MAAL lets the ATO attribute that profit to Australia anyway.
Why it matters to a small business: the MAAL targets only the very largest global corporations, those over A$1bn in revenue. It will never apply to you, but it shows that Australia had to build separate rules just to tax corporate giants that everyone else's rules could not reach.