We aim to maximise voluntary compliance by providing comprehensive advice, education, assistance and information to help customers understand their obligations. This approach supports the premise that most of our customers will pay the right tax at the right time if they are aware of their obligations.
However, our expert investigative teams actively pursue those avoiding tax and levies, or falsely claiming grants, exemptions and concessions. Apart from recovering outstanding liabilities, appropriate penalties and litigation can result.
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 2022–23, we assessed $976.5 million in liabilities from 11,827 cases.
Landholder acquisitions
The area where most revenue was collected involved the landholder provisions. These related 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, we assessed $667.8 million from 713 completed matters.
This comprised the determination of:
- 293 acquisition statements
- 231 private ruling requests (111 on landholder transactions, 116 on lease transactions and 4 on change in beneficial ownership transactions)
- 175 investigations (169 landholder investigations, 5 change in beneficial ownership investigations and one lease investigation)
- 14 trust registration applications.
We also released 3 new landholder decision tools on our website to help customers understand their obligations.
Investigations
We assessed $308.7 million from 11,114 completed investigations in 2022–23. The 3 areas where most revenue was collected were land tax ($180.4 million), payroll tax ($86.3 million) and land transfer (stamp) duty ($28.9 million). In addition, we created 471 information reports from tip-offs via our website, phone or mail.
