Fighting tax and financial crime

Tackling financial crime

Serious financial crime is a significant risk to Australia’s financial markets, regulatory frameworks and our tax revenue base.

Coordinated information exchange is needed to tackle the threat.

The Government will provide $127.6  million to establish a Serious Financial Crime Taskforce that will develop inter-agency intelligence and conduct operations to target nationally significant serious financial crime and tax evasion.

Tackling international tax evasion

Under Australia’s leadership, the G20 endorsed a new Common  Reporting  Standard  (CRS) to catch individuals evading tax.

This automatic exchange of financial account information between tax authorities is critical to combating tax evasion. Australia will implement this from 1 January 2017.

Australia will also sign the international multilateral agreement to enable information to be exchanged between countries’ tax administrators.

This will better equip the ATO to receive crucial information from other jurisdictions to help identify, catch and prosecute tax cheats.

Exchange of information with Switzerland

Earlier this year, Australia became the first country to sign a declaration with Switzerland to share automatic financial account information.

This will expose offshore income that was previously hidden, so there will be nowhere to hide.

GST compliance programme

The GST compliance programme will be extended for three years to support the ATO in identifying  fraudulent  GST refunds,  under reporting  of GST liabilities,  failure to lodge GST returns  and outstanding  GST debts. This will help deter the black economy. This measure is expected to increase GST by $1.8  billion, to be paid to the states and territories.

The Government continues to crack down on tax and financial crime