GST fraud, false invoicing, dodgy gold dealers top ATO’s crime-fighting list

Last Wednesday (14 January), the Tax Office released freshly-updated figures attached to its Serious Financial Crime Taskforce (SFCT), which began operating in July 2015.

From its inception to December 2025, the ATO revealed the taskforce had raised over $3.32 billion in liabilities and collected over $1.13 billion. To date, it has completed 2,777 audits and reviews and helped progress cases resulting in criminal sentences for 94 people linked to serious financial crimes.

Serious tax crimes on the ATO’s radar included GST refund fraud, false invoicing, electronic sales suppression tools (ESSTs) and fraud in the precious metals refining industry.

GST fraudsters had constructed sophisticated related party structuring arrangements to obscure transactions and disguise artificial arrangements, the Tax Office found.

These dodgy arrangements involved features such as false invoicing between related entities, deliberate misalignment of GST accounting methods across groups, duplicated GST credit claims, GST credits claimed for activities that never occurred, and the use of straw directors to hide true relationships between entities.

The Tax Office also said it was homing in on false invoicing arrangements. These involved cases where a promoter entity issued invoices to a business, where no goods or services were provided. The business would then pay the invoice by cheque or bank transfer, and the promoter would return most of the amount paid to the business’s owners as cash.

Next, the business would illegally claim deductions and GST input tax credits stemming from the false invoice. The owners could use the cash received for private purposes or to pay cash to workers, without properly reporting the amounts in their tax returns, the ATO said.

Some businesses were also misusing electronic sales suppression tools (ESSTs) to under-report their taxable income, the taskforce found. These tools were used to enable businesses to falsify records and understate their income to minimise their tax bills.

“This illegal software allows businesses to understate their income by untraceably falsifying, manipulating, hiding, deleting, or preventing the creation of selected transactions from their electronic records,” the ATO noted.

Last, the Tax Office said it was monitoring fraud in the precious metals refining industry. In these cases, fraudsters purchased GST-free gold bullion, refashioned it into scrap, and sold it inclusive of GST to a refiner.

The seller would then claim the GST input tax credits by falsely claiming that the GST-free gold bullion was purchased inclusive of GST.

The ATO said some participants in the precious metals industry, including refiners, bullion dealers, gold kiosks and dealers within gold recycling arrangements, had exploited precious metal GST rules.

“We are equipped with the resources, sophisticated data matching, analytics capability and intelligence-sharing relationships to uncover even the most elaborate financial crime.”

“Those who seek to defraud the tax and super systems will get caught and face the full force of the law.”