ATO assistant commissioner Scott Parkinson said the ATO wants to increase the information it has on the marketplace to target this type of activity, and said the private sector is a vital part of this.
“We’ve got very robust sources of data in phoenix that not only come from information that the ATO has [but] also from partner agencies from the private sector … the more information we have from the private sector on phoenix activity, the more we can actually work out where our clusters of risk are,” said Mr Parkinson.
“[This is] both in terms of the behaviour of individual operators and also the behaviour of facilitators, who are necessary in being able to dot their i’s and cross their t’s, as it were, around the regulatory framework that operators need to avoid in order to evade sanctions.”
Mr Parkinson said the ATO will be undertaking further “access visits” over the next few weeks, aimed at preventing those who participate in and facilitate phoenix activity from continuing with that sort of behaviour.
“We’ll make announcements about those contemporaneously when they’re actually occurring,” he said.
“We will continue to go in hard and use the force of the law where we see people deliberately and systematically liquidate companies to rip off their employees, their suppliers and the community’s revenue.”