The ATO has released its compliance program for 2010/11. The program sets out risk areas facing the tax and superannuation systems identified by the ATO and the compliance activities that it plans to undertake to address them. Despite acknowledging that most taxpayers demonstrate high levels of voluntary compliance, the ATO’s latest compliance program flags needed attention on numerous target areas including individual taxpayers claiming incorrect or fraudulent refunds and small businesses omitting or incorrectly reporting property sales in business activity statements.
The program also reiterated the ATO’s continuing and increasing use of data-matching projects to verify information provided by individual taxpayers in their tax returns and by other parties. In particular, the ATO flagged interest in cross-referencing information relating to income received from employment, welfare, interest and dividends. This year, the ATO expects to data-match over 500 million transaction records reported to it by third parties.
