Outsourcing and Tax?

So IM is working for me, I'm making bank and i'm doing a lot of outsourcing. Now that i've expanded a bit I have some questions that noone (not even the tax office) can seem to answer.

Firstly, I live in Australia. Our tax laws are modelled from England and are roughly similar to USA.


Can I use wages paid to overseas staff as a deduction, in the same way you could for domestic staff?


My thoughts are that I can, but it presents some problems. I have good records on the amounts spent etc (odesk reports) but I havent collected any tax info from my staff. I possibly could do this for some of my full timers but I have a lot of people doing one-off jobs and staff turnover is high so it would suck to need to grab info from EVERY person who worked for me

Does anyone have experience in this, or any thoughts? I know this post is a bit of a ramble but its late, and this has been bugging me for ages so any help would be much appreciated,
Cheers.

I have no experience in tax matters for any country other than the USA. That being said, in the U.S. you can definitely deduct ODesk jobs that you outsource. This is a very common deduction and I do it myself for several different businesses that I run - both on and offline.

Thanks innocent, thats a big help i'll claim it for sure then What proof did you need? or do you just grab the totals from odesk and submit those.