The ATO says it is mining data to identify individuals with undisclosed offshore income and assets. Deputy Commissioner Michael Cranston said the new information would be used to encourage people to disclose under Project DO IT, the ATO’s offshore disclosure initiative.
“The net is closing for people who have undeclared offshore income – we’re looking at all our data and will be in touch with financial institutions, advisers and thousands of people over the coming months,” said Mr Cranston. He said the ATO will be asking some people to explain offshore transactions and suggesting that they may want to disclose under Project DO IT.
The ATO will significantly increase its compliance focus by examining data including: information from overseas tax authorities on Australians with offshore investments and bank accounts; information from Australian and foreign banks on fund flows, interest and account balances; information from informants about offshore accounts, and money transfers to and from offshore bank accounts.
To date, the ATO’s Project DO IT initiative has received 166 disclosures raising an additional id=”mce_marker”3m in tax liabilities. There have been more than 250 expressions of interest, where taxpayers have identified themselves and said they will be making a disclosure. There have also been more than 600 general enquiries.
Mr Cranston said the ATO expects a large number of disclosures towards the end of the initiative as taxpayers get their affairs in order. He said most people getting in touch with the ATO are reporting accounts in Switzerland, Israel, Lichtenstein, the Netherlands, South Africa and Hong Kong, “so we’ll obviously be looking closely at [the] flow of funds to those countries”.
Source: ATO media release, 30 June 2014
[LTN 123, 30/6/14]