The ATO received specific funding in the 2010 Budget to look closely at GST compliance, and will be implementing a dedicated program over the next four years to deal with some specific compliance issues.
The timely lodgment of activity statements;
Verifying GST refund claims;
Identifying and dealing with those that deliberately avoid GST; and
Addressing aging GST debts and those who deliberately use debt as a way of avoiding their tax obligations.
They say that they are continuing to expand their ability to identify non-lodgers and detect businesses that overclaim entitlements, deliberately under-report or omit income and use cash transactions to hide income.
They will do this in part by:
Comparing businesses to small business benchmarks for their industry to select businesses for audit – businesses that do not report within their range may not be recording or paying tax on all their transactions, especially cash transactions;
Using benchmarks to calculate default assessments where a business provides insufficient or unreliable information or has not met their lodgment requirements; and
Using new risk filters and risk models to detect incorrect or fraudulent refund claims on activity statement credits.
