Privately owned and wealthy groups
Privately owned and wealthy groups operate some of Australia's largest and most successful businesses and have complex financial and legal arrangements.
We view privately owned and wealthy groups as:
- companies and their associated subsidiaries (often referred to as economic groups) with an annual turnover of more than $10 million and that are not public groups or foreign owned
- Australian resident individuals who, together with their business associates, control net wealth over $5 million.
Our approach is to consider all entities under the control of the individual with the primary decision-making role in the group. This is so we can better understand the choices and behaviours of the controlling mind behind a private group structure.
Subject to privacy restrictions, we generally engage with the head of the group rather than separate group entities when conducting our enquiries.
We support privately owned and wealthy groups to pay the right amount of tax through 3 tax performance programs designed to:
- support willing participation in the tax system
- help them to get things right
- find and address deliberate tax avoidance.
Private wealth population programs
Our privately owned and wealthy groups tax performance programs are tailored to 3 key segments:
These populations are not mutually exclusive – some associated entities belong to more than one group.
Top 500
The Top 500 include private groups that are not public groups or foreign owned that:
- have over $250 million in turnover, regardless of net asset value
- have over $500 million in net assets, regardless of turnover
- have over $100 million in turnover and over $250 million in net assets
- are market leaders or of specific interest.
We engage directly with these groups from year to year to establish a high level of assurance that they are paying the right amount of tax.
Find out more about the top 500 private groups tax performance program.
Next 5,000
The Next 5,000 include entities linked to Australian resident individuals who, together with their associates, control wealth of more than $50 million and are not included in the Top 500 population.
We aim to increase ongoing willing participation by:
- applying our justified trust methodology in our one-to-one tailored engagements
- engaging through tailored reviews that apply a risk-based approach
- providing certainty on significant commercial deals through early engagement and pre-lodgment agreements.
Find out more about the Next 5,000 tax performance program.
Medium and emerging private groups
Medium and emerging private groups include:
- private groups linked to an Australian resident individual who, together with their associates, control wealth between $5 million and $50 million
- Australian businesses with annual turnover of more than $10 million that are not public or foreign-owned and not linked to a high wealth private group.
Medium and emerging private groups represent most of the total private groups in the privately owned and wealthy groups population. We use enhanced data and analytics to understand the operating environment of these groups, identify and address tax risks and design tailored approaches to mitigate those risks.
Find out more about the medium and emerging private groups tax performance program.
Our support
Our tax performance programs are designed to support privately owned and wealthy groups to willingly pay the right amount of tax. We recognise most taxpayers do the right thing, but where we see deliberate tax avoidance, we act to address it with our tax avoidance taskforce.