Our tax performance programs play a key role in our Tax Avoidance Taskforce work to prevent, detect and address tax avoidance to ensure the largest and wealthiest taxpayers pay the right amount of tax.
Privately owned and wealthy groups play an important role in the Australian economy as well as the tax and super systems. Supporting them to meet their obligations continues to be a priority focus for us.
What's changing
From 1 July, we’ve combined our Next 5,000 and Medium and Emerging (M&E) private group tax performance programs into one Private groups tax performance program. This will provide a consistent risk-based approach to prioritise our compliance activities across all private groups within the Next 5,000 and M&E populations.
We’ve also retired the streamlined assurance review (SAR) product specific to the Next 5,000 program and won’t commence any new SARs. We’ll complete SARs that are already in progress, in accordance with our existing approach.
What’s not changing
- The Top 500 private groups tax performance program and Commercial Deals program will continue in their current form to obtain assurance over significant private group taxpayers and transactions. Together, these programs will continue to provide the community with confidence that Australia’s largest privately owned groups are paying the right amount of tax.
- The current private group taxpayer review or audit experience will remain the same. Having one risk-based program will enable our staff to apply consistent approaches across our private group compliance interactions. We’ll continue to tailor the intensity of our reviews according to the size of the private group and consequence of the identified risks.
- We’ll continue to encourage and promote the importance of tax governance for all private groups. Our findings have confirmed that mistakes and errors that lead to non-compliance often occur when private groups have inadequate or insufficient tax governance and record keeping in place. When we review larger high-wealth private groups approaching Top 500 program thresholds, we’ll continue to seek an understanding of their tax governance frameworks.
- Our compliance resource investment focused on the Next 5,000 and M&E private groups population is not changing.
- We’ll continue to provide clear communication to private groups about the risks we’re focusing on in line with our Areas of focus and What attracts our attention web content.
We’ve now updated our web content to reflect the Private groups tax performance program. We’ll retain the Next 5,000 program web pages for a period of time to continue providing support and guidance to those taxpayers who are being reviewed under a SAR.
Keep up to date
We have tailored communication channels for medium and large private and public groups and multinational businesses, to keep you up to date with updates and changes you need to know.
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