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ATO Data Matching and You
Renting a room through Air BNB? Have you declared this income?
According to the tax office, an “extensive data-matching program” will be used to identify taxpayers receiving income from short-term rentals, with information from online platform sharing sites for around 190,000 Australians to be examined to identify taxpayers who have left out rental income and over-claimed deductions.
By using the new data provided by online rental platforms, including income received per listing as well as listing dates, enquiry and booking rates, prices charged or quoted per night, and other information, the ATO will seek to identify taxpayers not meeting their registration, reporting, lodgement, or payment obligations
Do you provide services via Uber, Deliveroo or Airtasker? Do you sell goods online including EBay, Facebook, Gumtree?
It's not just the sharing economy that they are investigating. The ATO are collecting new data from financial institutions and online selling sites as part of their credit and debit cards and online selling data-matching programs.
They are requesting:
the total credit and debit card payments received by businesses
information on online sellers who have sold at least $12,000 worth of goods or services
Data matching plays an important role in helping to prevent unfair competition. The ATO will be matching this data with information that they have from income tax returns, activity statements and other ATO records to identify businesses that may not be reporting all their income or meeting their registration, lodgment or payment obligations.
What is Data Matching:
Data matching is a powerful administrative and law enforcement tool. Information from a variety of third-party sources is compiled electronically, validated, analysed and used for a range of education and compliance activities.
Data matching allows the ATO to:
pre-fill tax returns, making it easier for everyone to lodge their tax
reassure the community that they protect honest people and businesses from unfair competition
ensure people and businesses:
lodge tax returns and activity statements when required to do so
correctly declare their income and claim offsets and other benefits
comply with their obligations.
It allows the ATO to detect people and businesses operating outside the tax system, detect fraud against the Commonwealth, and recover debt.
What Does this mean for you:
It is vital that you report all income that you generate through online sales and the sharing economy.
This can include but not limited to both selling sites (Ebay, Gumtree, Facebook etc) and the share economy (Uber, Air Bnb, Airtasker etc)
If you believe you have made any errors in reporting income it is vital that you amend these immediately.
It is also important that you are correctly registered for an ABN and GST (in the case of Ride Sharing), and all reporting is updated.
Please call us on 07 5502 6673 to discuss further
