Foreign investor amnesty over, ATO to now cross-check 32 years of property records

Foreign investor amnesty over, ATO to now cross-check 32 years of property records
Jonathan ChancellorDecember 7, 2020

The Australian Tax Office will be scrutinising property records for the last 32 years in its bid to track down illegal buyers.

In a notice about a data matching program estimated to include 11.3 million people, the ATO said it would acquire details of real property transactions from September 20, 1985 to June 30, 2017 from all states and territories.

The total number of records is estimated at about one million for each year from rental bond authorities and about 30 million for each year from revenue and land title offices, the notice in the latest government gazette said.

The purpose of this data matching program is to ensure that taxpayers are correctly meeting taxation and other program obligations administered by the ATO in relation to their dealings with real property, the notice said.

These obligations include registration, lodgment, reporting and payment responsibilities. 

The ATO's data-matching project comes just a week after the government's amnesty towards foreign investors, who had unlawfully purchased property, lapsed.

 

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Jonathan Chancellor

Jonathan Chancellor is one of Australia's most respected property journalists, having been at the top of the game since the early 1980s. Jonathan co-founded the property industry website Property Observer and has written for national and international publications.

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