We believe most of our customers will pay the right tax at the right time if they are aware of their obligations. We provide comprehensive advice and education to help customers understand their obligations and maximise voluntary compliance.
However, our expert investigative teams actively pursue those avoiding tax or levies, or falsely claiming grants, exemptions and concessions. This can result in penalties and litigation, on top of recovering outstanding liabilities.
We conduct investigations, audits, data analysis and other research to detect non-compliance, and we are assisted by information from external agencies such as the Australian Taxation Office, WorkSafe Victoria and other Australian state and territory revenue offices.
In 2023–24, we assessed $733.27 million in liabilities from 11,906 cases.
Landholder acquisitions
The landholder provisions relate to acquisitions of interests (being shares or units) in a company or unit trust scheme which has landholdings in Victoria of $1 million or more.
In this area in 2023–24, we assessed $287.15 million from 541 completed matters, made up of:
- 248 acquisition statements
- 153 private ruling requests (83 on landholder transactions, 66 on lease transactions and 4 on change in beneficial ownership transactions)
- 129 investigations (119 landholder investigations, 6 lease investigations and 4 change in beneficial ownership investigations)
- 11 trust registration applications.
Investigations
We assessed $446.12 million from 11,365 completed investigations in 2023–24. The 3 areas where most revenue was collected were land tax ($241.5 million), payroll tax ($136.9 million) and land transfer (stamp) duty ($29.1 million).
In addition, we investigated 643 reports from tip-offs via our website, phone or mail.
