Who's your (tax) daddy

March 28, 2007 3:23 PM

Single largest taxpayer in... This comment highlighted that: The club is the largest single taxpayer in Hong Kong. It paid HK$12.4bn in 2005-06 - about 8.6% of all taxes collected by the government - on turnover of HK$98.9bn. In Virginia and lots of other places its a power company. In the Chinese province of Yiwu its a market specializing in counterfeit goods. Citigroup in South Dakota. Pemex in Mexico. A cell phone company in Afghanistan. A gold mining company in Indonesia... and Guatemala. MIT in Cambridge. And the US? Some say its the government itself. This 1999 posting inconclusively points the smoking gun at... ... and in your piece of the world?
posted by RandlePatrickMcMurphy (7 comments total)

This is proving to be surprisingly hard to ascertain in Australia. I would guess that it's BHP Billiton, but can't confirm it. The top taxpayer of his day was 'Mac' Robertson (of Freddo Frog fame). In Tasmania it's Wrest Point Casino. In the Northern Territory it would possibly be Alcan. That's about all I could find. As I said, surprising.
posted by tellurian at 6:44 PM on March 28, 2007

Cambridge, MA is actually a bit screwed - its largest landowners are Harvard and MIT, both of which are tax exempt, but which pay a little over a million in voluntary fees (Harvard actually pays more than MIT, though).

Cool idea for a thread, wish we had a bit more though:

Biggest US taxpayers (in 2004):

ExxonMobile - $11B
Citigroup - $6.1B
Altria, which includes Philip Morris, is only #4.
posted by blahblahblah at 8:27 PM on March 28, 2007

Yiwu is not a province; it looks like the province it's in is Zhejiang.
posted by jiawen at 9:44 PM on March 28, 2007

Cool idea for a thread, but I'd be even more interested in the single largest tax dodger.
posted by BrotherCaine at 11:18 PM on March 28, 2007

BrotherCaine, I'd like to nominate Walter Anderson Crump and in Australia - Kerry Francis Bullmore Packer.
posted by tellurian at 11:47 PM on March 28, 2007

Heh, I thought this post looked familiar.
posted by dhartung at 5:03 PM on March 29, 2007

Thanks tellurian, for the cool post-tax season reading.
posted by BrotherCaine at 7:14 PM on March 29, 2007