Unprompted voluntary disclosures
If you make a voluntary disclosure before we tell you about a review or audit of your tax affairs for a relevant period, we process it in the same way as the tax return or statement it relates to. If we need more information, we will contact you or your representative.
Once we process your information, we will issue an assessment or other notice. The assessment or notice tells you:
- how much tax or overpaid credits and benefits you owe
- any penalties and interest charges we impose
- the date your payment is due.
If you make a voluntary disclosure by revising an earlier activity statement, we won't issue a notice of amended assessment (NOAA) if we accept your amendment in full. If we don't, we will issue a notice.
We will usually accept a voluntary disclosure where:
- the declaration was not in the exact form
- you didn't tell us all the information (such as the item number in the return or statement), but we can work out the required information from your description.
However, if you tell us you have found a mistake or give us documents without sufficient details for us to work out the amount of the adjustment, we won't consider this a voluntary disclosure.
Voluntary disclosures during an examination
If you make a voluntary disclosure during an audit or review and don't provide all the information we need, we will either:
- contact you to resolve the issue, usually asking you for more details and supporting information such as records or invoices
- accept that you have provided most of the information.
We usually issue an amended assessment after we have:
- examined the voluntary disclosure
- looked at its related transactions
- considered the law.
If there are other issues that we are examining, we will usually determine if an adjustment is needed for them before issuing the amended assessment for the period. The amended assessment may not be exactly what is in your voluntary disclosure.