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  • Department of Home Affairs visa – October 2015 to 2022–23 financial years

    The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) visa data-matching program has been operating since 2009.

    This protocol consolidates the existing visa data-matching programs:

    • October 2015 to 2016–17 financial years program (gazetted 4 August 2015)
    • 2017–18 to 2019–20 financial years program (gazetted 18 December 2017).

    This protocol outlines our intention to continue collecting data on visas granted in the period 2020–21 to 2022–23 financial years.

    For this program we collect information from the Department of Home Affairs (Home Affairs) on active and newly granted visas. The data is matched against our records to ensure visa holders, visa sponsors and migration agents are meeting their tax and superannuation obligations.

    Visa data is made available to ATO compliance staff to support our risk profiling and trend analysis of the visa population, smarter use of data helps improve our decisions, services and voluntary compliance.

    Visa data for 1 March 2020 to 28 March 2021 will be used to assist in confirming eligibility for the government's novel coronavirus (COVID-19) economic response, JobKeeper measure. The data will support pre-issue and post-issue compliance checks enabling us to follow-up potentially false or misleading declarations.

    This data-matching program follows the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s (OAIC) Guidelines on data matching in Australian Government administrationExternal Link (2014). The guidelines assist Australian Government agencies to use data-matching as an administrative tool in a way that complies with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and the Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act) and are consistent with good privacy practice.

    We have a responsibility to protect public revenue and to maintain community confidence in the integrity of the tax and superannuation systems. Undertaking the Home Affairs visa data matching program will assist us in investigating and taking steps to mitigate fraud against public revenue.

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      Last modified: 15 Feb 2021QC 64111