Our top 100 income tax and GST assurance programs seek to provide assurance, through applying the justified trust methodology, that top 100 taxpayers are reporting and paying the right amount of tax in Australia.
We're continuing to see improvements in the tax performance of the top 100. If you're one of the top 100, read about how we're continuing to enhance our engagement with you in line with your assurance behaviour.
Real-time engagement
For your income tax affairs, we've mainly engaged with you through your annual income tax pre-lodgment compliance review (PCR), where we apply the justified trust methodology.
PCRs aim to:
- use early, tailored, and transparent engagement to assure tax outcomes
- identify and manage material tax risk
- enable us to raise and resolve potential compliance concerns as they arise.
We want to achieve real-time engagement and provide greater certainty for you. Over the next 12 to 18 months, we'll be working with you to bring your reviews into real time. The timeframe will depend on your willingness and ability to achieve this.
To achieve this, we'll do simultaneous, tailored reviews across multiple ‘back years’ (if needed) and tailor our engagement based on your situation.
Early engagement and pre-lodgment disclosures
We encourage you to make pre-lodgment disclosures during a PCR or in relation to your GST affairs, to enable early engagement on significant matters in real time. We've released new guidanceOpens in a new window about our expectations of you and what we'll be doing.
Leveraging assurance previously obtained – income tax
We're focused on how we scope and tailor our engagement so we can:
- partner with you if you've reached a high assurance, to help you maintain it – we'll use prior assurances where possible
- more intensively scrutinise your tax affairs if you've yet to obtain a sufficient assurance level
- invest in the most important matters.
We've observed that 'high' assurance taxpayers maintain their rating over multiple reviews. High assurance taxpayers will now benefit from a third monitoring and maintenance year, meaning reduced engagement with us and help to achieve real-time engagement.
To further streamline reviews, if you're an entity that's wholly or substantially domestic in operations and ownership, with predominantly domestic transactions, we'll no longer be doing the effective tax borne calculation in our monitoring and maintenance reviews and refresh reviews (unless there's exceptional or changed circumstances).
Leveraging assurance previously obtained – GST
In refresh reviews, we'll take a tailored approach to GST data and transaction testingOpens in a new window. Our testing will be informed by our understanding of your situation across the 4 focus areas including tax governance, tax risks flagged to market, correct reporting, and the GST analytical tool.
We've needed to achieve 75% sufficient coverage of a top 100 economic group's GST throughput by doing a GST assurance review for one or more entities in that group. We'll now be able to obtain sufficient coverage through a combination of GST assurance reviews and specific reviews for additional reporters. We'll aim for 75% through an assurance review of at least 2 GST reporters (including the largest GST reporter). Where this isn't possible, we'll get this coverage through at least 2 assurance reviews that cover a minimum of 50% of the group's GST throughput, with the balance being specific reviews to reach the 75% metric.
Refresh review guidance
We've released new guidance to assist you during an income tax or GST refresh review.
We've also published the Top 100 program – tailored approach to obtaining, maintaining and refreshing assuranceOpens in a new window. This provides a snapshot of how we tailor our engagement across the various stages of the justified trust cycle for income tax.
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