Treasurer Josh Frydenberg (Image: AAP/Lukas Coch)

Anyone who watches the ASX announcements feed will by now have noticed that lots of listed companies are producing announcements — like this one from Perth-based Iluka Resources — which detail the amount of JobKeeper they received over the last two financial years, how many employees it was for and whether any of this taxpayer funding has subsequently been voluntarily repaid.

These announcements are the result of new pressure from Parliament imposed on hundreds of public companies, following a compromise deal between the federal government and One Nation. The Coalition was trying to persuade Pauline Hanson to not support independent Senator Rex Patrick’s sensible proposal to produce a public register of all JobKeeper recipients which have annual revenues north of $10 million.

The result is that we have negligible visibility over 97% of the unprecedented JobKeeper largesse, but even more disclosure of the 3% that went to the public companies we pretty much already knew about.

However, it is still useful to get the disclosure in a standard format, and the new requirements do appear to be increasing the number of public companies refunding part or all of their JobKeeper receipts.

Some public companies, such as debt collector Credit Corp, attempted to hide their JobKeeper receipts and then decided to pay the funds back once they worked out that disclosure was unavoidable.

Credit Corp’s JobKeeper announcement dropped on October 28, detailing that $12.7 million had been claimed and then returned over two financial years. This was news to most people who follow the stock, although the company stresses that it never put this through the profit and loss account, hence it didn’t feel it needed to be disclosed.

There’s also an interesting trend developing where public companies are holding back their JobKeeper disclosure to the ASX until after their AGMs. Here are some examples:

  • Qantas: Held AGM on November 5 and disclosed enormous $885 million JobKeeper haul for 27,419 staff on November 11
  • Star Entertainment: Held AGM on October 28 and disclosed $157.4 million JobKeeper bailout for 7040 staff at 4.10pm on November 11
  • Domain Holdings: Held AGM on November 4 but didn’t lodge disclosure about $6.5 million JobKeeper refund until November 8
  • Domino’s Pizza: Held AGM on November 3 and informed ASX on November 8 about fully repaying $1.71 million in JobKeeper.

The other interesting trend is how some of the biggest and most controversial JobKeeper claimants are dragging their heels on ASX disclosure. We’re yet to hear from the likes of Crown Resorts, Seven West Media, Premier Investments, Accent Leisure, Harvey Norman and Eagers Automotive.

You can work out the JobKeeper situation with most of these companies from their financial accounts, with the exception of Solomon Lew’s Premier Investments, which has never revealed its gross haul. (Stand by for a likely 8pm announcement some Friday night after the December 2 AGM.)

It was certainly clear at Nine Entertainment’s AGM on Thursday that chair and former treasurer Peter Costello is no fan of the widely rorted scheme, which Nine managed to avoid taking. (The Parliamentary Budget Office estimates that $38 billion of the $88 billion paid out went to employers which didn’t qualify under the revenue reduction requirements.)

At the AGM I asked him whether Nine should have followed other companies’ lead and grabbed whatever it could get, or if the company took an ethical position not to rort the scheme.

Costello replied:

We hoped that we wouldn’t qualify and I think for us you had to anticipate a 50% downturn. As it turned out, we didn’t have a 50%. We were able — I’m quite proud of this — we were able to get through coronavirus without taking JobKeeper and without terminating people’s employment. That shows what you can do when you’ve got a strong media company.

If only some of our greedy billionaires like Kerry Stokes and Solomon Lew took a similar view rather than hopping into JobKeeper when the public companies they control went nowhere near the required 50% drop in revenue.

As News Corp’s Terry McCrann explained in a well-argued takedown of JobKeeper, if only Treasurer Josh Frydenberg had followed the New Zealand model and built in an ability for the ATO to claw back taxpayer funds from those who over-claimed.