Overview
The work of the Tax Avoidance Taskforce ensures tax paid in Australia by certain taxpayers is accurate and complete. Through our work, we audit some of the biggest taxpayers operating in Australia, including multinational enterprises, large public and large private businesses (and associated individuals).
In 2019–20 year, the ATO raised $4.3 billion in liabilities and collected nearly $2.5 billion in cash collections (audit yield). The Taskforce has surpassed its commitment to government in each year since it began. Over the first four years of the Taskforce, the ATO has raised $18.2 billion in liabilities against public groups, multinationals, wealthy individuals and associated private groups, including trusts and promoters, and has collected over $10.8 billion in audit yield.
The response from the large business market has been encouraging. Taxpayers are now seeking to manage and prevent tax risks in their business by adopting robust tax governance arrangements, which include proactive and open engagement with the ATO. We continue to encourage and support early engagement and the development of sound tax governance arrangements by private, public and multinational entities to effectively manage tax risk.
We are continually improving our data, analytics, risk, and intelligence capabilities to identify and manage tax avoidance risk. This year saw significant progress on data accessibility and use our risk detection services which has improved our ability to target our compliance efforts and deliver on taskforce objectives. This work will be expanded over the next three years to deliver cutting edge technology and advanced analytics capabilities to manage and interrogate our extensive data resources.
Highlights for 2019–20
Highlights of the Tax Avoidance Taskforce contribution for 2019–20 include:
- The taskforce has helped generate $2.7 billion in tax liabilities and $1.6 billion in cash from large public groups and multinational corporations, wealthy individuals and private groups.
- The Multinational Anti-Avoidance Law (MAAL) has been successfully implemented. A comparison of pre-restructure years to the post-restructure year has confirmed those restructures resulted in more than $8 billion additional taxable sales being booked in Australia. With the increase in sales being booked in Australia, the ATO expected that the MAAL would increase the GST being paid by affected taxpayers. The ATO has estimated an additional $850 million of GST has been paid, with estimated business-to-consumer net GST amount of $80 million since July 2016.
- We have also engaged with over 600 of our largest private groups. Of these, we have completed 262 engagements with taxpayers willingly adopting robust tax governance practices to manage and prevent tax risks. There were 54 Top 500 groups with $7.35 billion tax assured across multiple years.
- We have engaged with over 900 of the Top 1000 large public groups, with 790 of these reviews finalised and over 130 reviews in progress.
- We are now focusing on specialist large market advisors that promote and implement tax avoidance schemes, and engage in uncooperative, misleading and obstructive behaviour including the misuse of Legal Professional Privilege (LPP) during our reviews and audits. This includes developing new best practice guidance for LPP claims and principles for large market advisors supporting more robust self-governance. Where tax avoidance arrangements are identified, we will issue Taxpayer alerts to advise taxpayers of our concerns.