Program overview
The ATO has a particular focus on all aspects of the sharing economy. We believe that some people using sharing economy platforms are failing to report their income, either on purpose or because they assume their level of activity constitutes a hobby and doesn’t require reporting. Our focus is to ensure that people renting a room, their home while they’re away or an investment property through web or app based platforms in the sharing economy understand their obligations.
In 2016 there were approximately 2 million individual taxpayers who reported rental income of $42 billion and/or claimed rental expenses totalling $45 billion.
There is an increase in people renting homes, apartments, units or rooms via platform sharing sites to generate income. The increased use of these sites means there is an increased risk of people not understanding their tax obligations when it comes to renting out part or all of their property.
This protocol has been prepared to meet requirements of the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s (OAIC) (2014) Guidelines on data matching in Australian Government administration) (the guidelines).
Program objectives
Our data-matching programs help us fulfil our responsibility to protect public revenue and maintain community confidence in the integrity of the tax and superannuation systems.
The objectives of the sharing economy accommodation data-matching program are to:
- promote voluntary compliance and increase community confidence in the integrity of the tax system
- identify and educate those individuals failing to meet their registration or lodgment obligations and assist them to comply
- gain insights from the data that may help to develop and implement treatment strategies to improve voluntary compliance; which may include educational or compliance activities as appropriate
- obtain intelligence to increase the ATO’s understanding of the behaviours and compliance profiles of individuals and businesses that provide services within the sharing economy
- ensure through compliance activities that short term rental providers comply with their lodgment, correct reporting and payment of taxation obligations.
The ATO is seeking to obtain external data to cross-reference with its own data to identify relevant cases for administrative action, including compliance and educational strategies.
Why we look at sharing economy accommodation data
The ATO has a particular focus on how we can improve our information to assist individuals to understand the rules around short term rental income and will expand our use of third party data to identify omitted rental income and over claimed deductions.
We also seek to identify taxpayers who use sharing economy rental platforms as a way to disguise their property as being genuinely available for rent by listing the property but not responding to enquiries.
We will match the data provided by the rental platforms against ATO records to identify individuals who rent property on a short term basis but may not be meeting their registration, reporting, lodgment or payment obligations.