The latest enforcement drive of the esteemed Australian Taxation Office is to target large firms. The government authority hopes to raise extra revenue by auditing up to one third of the 1,300 largest firms in Australia, most of which are public companies. The rationale produced by the ATO is that these firms will present one of the largest tax risks. The way that the commissioner of Taxation looks at the definition of a large firm is if it turns over more than $250,000,000.00 or if it dominates a market for a particular good or service in Australia. Companies are classified on a scale of non-compliance from high through to low risk.

High risk candidates will be watched very closely and auditing is likely to reveal significant problems which these companies will need to deal in order to prevent the ATO taking significant action against them. The ATO has hastened to add that only a very small proportion of reviews will lead to full blown audits. The way that the the ATO intends to collect information about these companies is by examining the past compliance of the business, if they have risk management procedures in place, through industry monitoring and cooperation with other sectors of the government such as state based revenue agencies. According to Michael D-Ascenzo, there will also be an eye of suspicion over companies that utilise tax professionals with a history of shady tax practices. The head tax man says that each company will be run through a series of risk filters to identify the possibility of non-compliance.

The ATO’s systems of compliance monitoring are becoming ever more sophisticated as well with the agency having the ability to cross match records from bank accounts, dividend payments, PAYG returns and foreign tax regulators in order to identify undeclared income. Contrastingly, however, the commissioner emphasised the need for greater trust between big business in Australia and the ATO. This makes sense given that the tax office is ultimately run by public servants who are paid to serve the elected representatives of the people. The ATO must not be a bar to the efficient functioning of the economy, it must provide the background to facilitate this. Overly intrusive and obstructionist tax regulation borders on being undemocratic, because the government must always act ultimately in the interests of the Australian people and these large companies produce goods and services which people consume and provide employment to thousands of Australians, nevertheless, the ATO has stated that it wants to be tougher on big business.