Take Google, whose official corporate motto is "Don't Be Evil". Google's dual personality There is a lot to admire about Google, or Alphabet as its parent company is now known, from the perspective of an investor or anyone interested in business. For example, in contrast to the boring Australian corporate philosophy of passively returning any excess cash to shareholders through dividends, Alphabet is investing in all sorts of weird and wonderful endeavours – which of course may prove to be lucrative businesses over time, but mainly because it can. It's a pioneer in self-driving cars, for example. It's trying to develop a system to deliver the internet from air balloons to people in unconnected and mainly poor regions.

It even set up a business unit that talks earnestly about "curing death". Yet the company has been criticised in many parts of the globe, such as the UK and here in Australia, for the relatively tiny amount of tax it pays on the advertising revenue generated in said countries. Before you say anything, of course, companies should and do pay tax on their profits, not revenues. But Google, like many other multi-national corporations, uses elaborate techniques such as "transfer pricing" to effectively shift its profits from relatively high taxing jurisdictions to lower tax ones (in its case Singapore, but Ireland is also popular). Company restructure

To its credit, on Friday last week Google announced a restructure and said it would count some of its advertising revenue locally on its tax bills. That is in response to laws passed by the government at the start of the year. Apple, the most valuable company on the planet, is a similar case. It makes products that genuinely changed society and that people are (perhaps unhealthily) obsessed with. It's incredible turnaround under Steve Jobs will be taught in business schools for decades. Yet it also has suffered criticism for its sophisticated tax-minimisation schemes. "Total political crap" was how Apple CEO Tim Cook famously described criticism of the company on tax in an interview with 60 Minutes last year. "There's no truth behind it. Apple pays every tax dollar we owe."

Finally, how about Atlassian? The Sydney-born software company also seems to be involved in these shenanigans. (Update: the company said in a statement that all licenses purchased in Australia are processed through its Australian entity, and changes on customer statements are due "simply due to a transition to another credit card processor"). At the very least, in 2014, the company moved its official statutory corporate headquarters to the UK where the corporate tax rate is 20 per cent, lower than the 30 per cent rate here in Australia where it is nominally from, and lower than the rate in the US (35 per cent) where it is listed. At the time it explained that decision as being designed to move it closer to its global investor base, but industry observers are sceptical.

Investor concerns Of course all companies have a fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders. Call me naive but I'm not entirely convinced investors would revolt over a few extra percentage points of tax, since many high-growth tech stocks are priced based on their revenue growth and potential rather than their trailing profits. To be clear, much of the blame for this mess should rest with governments for poorly designed tax systems. But it's also worth asking the question: why is tax avoidance so common in tech? Tech companies tend to hoard cash, because they operate in an industry where change is rapid, and capital (historically) has been hard to come by.