Protecting myGovIDs
Providing tax professionals with access to online services is critical to the efficiency and effectiveness of the system. To keep the system safe the ATO rely on professionals to protect their myGovID and their personal information.
Recently the ATO have been working with a small number of agents where they or their clients, or both, have been the victims of identity crime. In these instances, there has been a significant and disruptive impact on the agent and their clients.
This week the ATO’s Tax professionals newsletter will include an article that reinforces the need to protect your myGovID and personal information, and provides practical steps tax professionals can take. For example, users can turn on the app notifications and can now view a summary of each time their myGovID has been set up on a device, the date their myGovID was set up on each device and the last time it was used to log in to a government online service.
You can read more about protecting your myGovID here.
ATO data-matching program: residential investment property loans
The ATO has advised that it will acquire residential investment property loan data from authorised financial institutions under a data-matching program for 2021-22 through to 2025-26. The data items include: client identification details (names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, etc); account details (account numbers, BSB’s, balances, commencement and end dates, etc); transaction details (transaction date, transaction amount etc); property details (addresses, etc). The ATO estimates that records relating to approximately 1.7 million individuals will be obtained each financial year.
Exposure draft legislation: Public country-by-country reporting
The Government has released exposure draft legislation to give effect to its proposal announced in the October 2022-23 Budget to introduce a transparency measure for multinational entities to release publicly certain tax information on a country-by-country basis, together with a statement on their approach to taxation. The measure is intended to enhance the tax information entities disclose to the public (for income years commencing from 1 July 2023). The government is now seeking stakeholders’ views on the proposed measure with comment due by 28 April 2023. (Note that a previous consultation on other multinational enterprise tax integrity and transparency proposals was held in August and September 2022 and the government is consulting separately on the other elements of its multinational tax measure.)
APRA: more info on SDT reporting standards
APRA has published 11 additional frequently asked questions (FAQs) on the Superannuation Data Transformation (SDT) reporting standards. APRA released the additional FAQs to provide further guidance to registrable superannuation entity licensees on the amendments to reporting standards finalised in APRA’s 3 March 2023 response to consultation on minor amendments.
