Find out how we process your voluntary disclosure; whether it's unprompted or because of an examination.
Unprompted voluntary disclosures
If you make a voluntary disclosure before we tell you that an examination is to be made of your affairs relating to a taxation law for a relevant period, we process it in the same way as we process the tax return or statement it relates to. If we need more information, we will contact you or your representative.
Once we have processed your information, we will issue an assessment or other notice. The assessment or notice tells you how much tax or overpaid credits and benefits you owe, any penalties and interest charges we have imposed and the date your payment is due.
If you make a voluntary disclosure by revising an earlier activity statement, we won't issue a notice of amended assessment if we accept your amendment in full. If we don't, we will issue a notice.
We will usually accept a voluntary disclosure where the declaration was not in the exact form or if you did not tell us all the information (such as the item number in the return or statement), but we can work out the required information from your description.
However, if you tell us you have found a mistake or give us documents without sufficient details for us to work out the amount of the adjustment, we will not consider this a voluntary disclosure.
Voluntary disclosures during an examination
If you make a voluntary disclosure during an audit or review and do not provide all the information we need, we will either:
- contact you to resolve the issue, usually asking you for more details and/or supporting information such as records or invoices
- accept that you have provided most of the information.
We usually issue an amended assessment after we have examined the voluntary disclosure, its related transactions and considered the law. If there are other issues that we are examining, we will usually determine if an adjustment is needed for them before issuing the amended assessment for the period. The amended assessment may not be exactly what is in your voluntary disclosure.