A Senate inquiry into alleged tax-dodging by multinational companies operating in Australia could be awkward for some mining bosses.

The inquiry was launched in the wake of reports that companies including 21st Century Fox, BHP, Rio Tinto, the Commonwealth Bank and NAB are dodging a tax bill collectively worth billions.

The Tax Justice Network report estimated that around $80 billion in tax payments have been avoided by the ASX top 200 companies.

In a Senate meeting to draw up the terms of the probe, Senator Christine Milne also launched a push for the introduction of “legislation that requires Australian corporations to disclose all foreign subsidiaries in their financial statements”.

Of Australia’s largest 200 companies, 29 per cent have an effective tax rate of 10 per cent or less, and 14 per cent have an effective tax rate of zero per cent,” Senator Milne said.

She has called on the Government “to act on corporate tax evasion in Australia immediately, rather than unnecessarily waiting for the G20 in November 2014”.

The inquiry is in line with Federal Treasurer Joe hockey’s stated agenda for the upcoming G20 meetings.

“Some global companies aren't paying their fair share of tax anywhere,'” Mr Hockey said earlier this year.

“We want a global response. We expressed our continued full support for the G20 OECD action plan and I am pleased to say this work is on track for delivery at the Brisbane summit at the end of this year .The globe needs to know who is paying tax where.”

Among resource companies, Glencore may have been the most prominently-accused of failing to pay tax.

A story in Fairfax Media publication The Age says Glencore has not put a dollar into the tax bag for three years straight.

The paper says the miner “reduced its tax exposure by taking large, unnecessarily expensive loans from its associates overseas”.

“At up to 9 per cent, the interest rates on these $3.4 billion in loans were double what the company would have had to pay had it simply borrowed the money from the bank.”

“The truth is that Glencore Coal Investments Australia's operations in Australia are, because of the Group's business model, branch operations of the Swiss-domiciled parent entity, which uses the now dormant legal shell of an Australian body corporate in an attempt to hide the reality of its branch business in Australia,” an allegedly independent report for the article stated