The ATO is increasing its efforts to identify taxpayers who leave income out of their return.
The most common situations in which taxpayers deliberately or accidentally do not include income are:
- Second jobs;
- Capital gains on cryptocurrency;
- The Sharing Economy (e.g. Air BnB, Uber, etc);
- The Gig Economy (e.g. Airtasker);
- Foreign-sourced income.
The ATO has emphasised that it has a number of other information sources that allow it to identify omitted foreign income, including data obtain from AUSTRAC (Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre), FATCA (Foreign Account Tax Compliance Act) and other international exchange of information agreements.
Further, the ATO has obtained more than 650 million records from “a range of third party sources” – such as banks, ebay and Uber, to match and analyse with its own data to catch Australians not declaring income.
Penalties for omission of income range from 25% to 75% of the shortfall in addition to paying the tax owed.
