If the incessant barrage of sales ads hadn’t already given you the heads-up, the end of financial year is well and truly upon us.
But perhaps even more so than the aforementioned, the focus this year will be addressing an $8.7 billion elephant in the room, which is the shortfall between what Australian individuals are expected to pay in tax and the tax we’re actually paying. If you’ve been prone to grandiose expense claims in the past, you might want to think twice this time around.
Over the past few years, the ATO has ramped up its use of AI to spot anomalies and discrepancies in claims and filings, scanning huge data sets and notice things that might slip through the cracks otherwise. In 2022, for example, with the help of AI scanning large data sets, the ATO was able to take compliance action. That same year, the ATO saw uncollected and undisputed tax debt hit $44.8 billion, rising from $26.5 billion in 2019., the ATO’s AI tools were able to analyse the documents and find liabilities and owed debts from Australians who had been using the Panamanian law firm Mossack Fonseca to avoid tax.