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Media release 2006/51
The Tax Office today reassured the community it protects the personal information of Australia’s 11 million individual and 2.5 million business taxpayers.
Acting Tax Commissioner Greg Farr said the Tax Office takes the privacy of taxpayer information very seriously.
“Like the broader community the vast majority of our people do the right thing,” Mr Farr said.
“In an organisation of around 22,000 people, it is inevitable that a very small number of people will be tempted to do the wrong thing.”
Over the past 10 years around 1,800 taxpayers had their records wrongly accessed by around 200 tax officers.
“While no level of unauthorised access is acceptable this is a very small number in the context of the millions of transactions we have with taxpayers each year.
“Last financial year we detected unauthorised access by 27 staff members.
“We acted quickly and decisively to deal with these breaches –12 resigned during the course of investigations of which four were referred for prosecution, four were dismissed and 11 were subject to other action such as demotion or salary reduction.”
The action taken by the Tax Office depends on the seriousness of the breach.
“Sometimes people access records for what they believe is an apparently innocent reason, such as assisting family members to update their records.
“However, accessing taxpayer records, including an officer’s own records, those of friends, relatives or others is unauthorised in our books,” Mr Farr said.
Staff members can only access the parts of our systems relating directly to their jobs and cannot choose the cases they work on.
“When an officer accesses specific taxpayer information their computer user ID is logged with a time and date. We use this information to detect unauthorised access.
“To make sure our people are aware of their responsibilities under the law we have mandatory fraud and ethics awareness training.
“Our people are trained as part of the induction process when they join the Tax Office and everybody must do refresher training every two years.
“Before people even join the Tax Office as employees they must pass police checks, and those handling sensitive information must have up-to-date security clearances,” Mr Farr said.
The current training package is used by other government agencies and has also been provided to a number of international revenue collection agencies to train their own people.
“In addition to formal training we regularly remind our people of their responsibilities.
“Our computer log-on screens remind people everyday about the rules around accessing information – before they can start work they have to click on a button saying they have read and understood the message.
“We regularly review our internal controls in this area and we are subject to regular external reviews from a range of organisations including the Australian National Audit Office, the Parliament and the media,” said Mr Farr.
For more information about the way the Tax Office protects privacy and how access to personal information is restricted visit www.ato.gov.au
Last Modified: Tuesday, 21 November 2006
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