The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) has declared that its early role in a five-way international project to identify professional enablers of significant tax fraud was already reaping results.
Deputy Taxation Commissioner, Will Day said the Joint Chiefs of Global Tax Enforcement (J5) had made significant progress identifying operational targets through improved partnerships in just the first few months of the alliance.
“The ATO has shared intelligence within the alliance to identify areas of mutual interest and is now working on how we address and disrupt the actions of these enablers,” Mr Day said.
“As this activity is on ongoing we cannot make any further comment on it.”
He said that as a member of the J5 alliance, the ATO built a more comprehensive and accurate understanding of financial crime networks across Australia, the United Kingdom, the United States, Canada and the Netherlands.
“We are committed to sharing our expertise and exploring new ways of working with our international partners to ensure there is a truly transnational approach to combatting tax crime,” Mr Day said.
“Representatives from the ATO joined the J5 ‘Challenge’ in the Netherlands to demonstrate our sophistication in using data and analytics on the world stage.”
He said the ATO contributed seven datasets to the Challenge, and was represented by data scientists, data analysts and experts in network analytics and dataset and financial crime domains.
“The Challenge was an important next step in working with our international colleagues to develop tools and data analysis in real time to strengthen our combined ability to disrupt enablers of financial crime,” he said.
“We are piecing together the international jigsaw to reveal previously unknown connections, risk areas and behaviour, and expose targets for multilateral action.”
He said it was a timely reminder that those who promoted tax evasion schemes could no longer promise secrecy to their clients.
