The Modernisation of Tax Administration Systems (MTAS) program
As part of the 2024–25 Mid-Year Economic and Fiscal Outlook, the Australian Government announced support for an expansion of the MTAS program.
The program builds upon the changes that were:
- first announced in the March 2022 Budget as the 'Digitising trust income reporting and processing measure'
- delivered in Tax Time 2024.
Aims of the program
The MTAS program aims to:
- improve the lodgment experience for trustees and beneficiaries, making it easier to meet reporting obligations and reduce errors
- enable greater transparency through improved reporting, data matching and pre-fill
- strengthen system integrity and ensure consistent reporting across all trusts to enable us to confirm they're paying the right amount of tax
- support taxpayers to meet their obligations, and direct compliance and assurance activities towards taxpayers of highest risk.
Improvements to our systems
Improvements to our systems will:
- reduce compliance costs for trustees, beneficiaries and tax agents
- enable even more trust tax returns to be lodged electronically
- enable the pre-filling of trust distributions to beneficiaries' tax returns.
The MTAS program will deliver these improvements through staged changes, starting from Tax Time 2026.
MTAS program roadmap
The following are the changes we're making to the trust tax return as part of the MTAS program.
Tax Time 2026
For Tax Time 2026, we:
- added new statement of distribution labels to the trust tax return to improve reporting by individual beneficiaries of their income at IT5
- introduced trust distribution pre-fill for individual beneficiaries
- improved pre-lodgment validation of the trust tax return for tax agents.
Tax Time 2027
For Tax Time 2027, we'll implement the beneficiary TFN reporting for closely held trusts law change.
Tax Time 2028
For Tax Time 2028 we'll make the following changes to the trust tax return:
- add new labels to improve reporting and transparency, including in the statement of distribution and trust income schedule
- additional pre-lodgment validations for tax agents
- adjust the layout to incorporate new labels, improve usability and better align the statement of distribution to the trust income schedule.