How we notify the public
The ATO will notify the public of our intention to collect Commonwealth electoral roll data by:
- publishing a notice in the Federal Register of LegislationExternal Link gazette in the week starting 8 July 2026
- publishing this data-matching program protocol on our website at Data-matching protocols
- advising the data provider that they can
- notify their clients of their participation in this program
- should update their privacy policies to note that personal information is disclosed to the ATO for data-matching purposes.
Gazette notice
The following information about the data-matching program appears as a gazette notice in the Federal Register of Legislation.
Gazette notice: Commissioner of Taxation - Notice of a Commonwealth electoral roll data-matching program, 8 July 2026
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) will acquire Australian electoral roll data from the Australian Electoral Commission (AEC) on an ongoing basis.
The data items include:
- name of the registered voter
- residential address of the registered voter
- sex of the registered voter
- date of birth of the registered voter
- occupation of the registered voter.
The collected data may contain all, or a selection of these elements. We estimate that records relating to approximately 18 million individuals will be obtained each quarter.
Commonwealth electoral laws and associated regulations require or permit the AEC to make information available to nominated government agencies, political parties and members of parliament.
We are the matching agency and, in most cases, the sole user of the data obtained during this data-matching program. The electoral laws and regulations prohibit us from sharing this data.
For this data-matching program, we will match AEC data against ATO data holdings to identify non-compliance with registration, lodgment, reporting and payment obligations under tax and superannuation laws.
The data collected under this program will be used to :
- identify people that may be operating outside of the tax and superannuation systems
- locate taxpayers with outstanding tax and superannuation obligations
assist with the administration of Australia's Foreign Investment Framework requirements in residential and agricultural land, where a person acquires Australian property and does not appear on the electoral roll.
A document describing this program is available at ato.gov.au/dmprotocols.
This program follows the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s Guidelines on data matching in Australian Government administration (2014) (the guidelines). The guidelines include standards for the use of data matching as an administrative tool in a way that:
- complies with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and the Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act)
- is consistent with good privacy practice.
A full copy of the ATO’s privacy policy can be accessed at ato.gov.au/privacy