‘They’ll find you eventually’: Service platforms should check SERR status

The 31 January 2026 reporting deadline for the ATO’s Sharing Economy Reporting Regime (SERR) is fast approaching, with steep penalties for late lodgments, RSM has reminded service platform operators.

Sam Mohammad, national head of tax services at RSM, told Accounting Times that many platform operators were unaware they were captured by the ATO’s expanded SERR regime, despite the law's amendment in July 2024.

“There are a bunch of website operators; people who operate apps or have some sort of facilitation service; who actually don't even think of themselves as a platform operator,” he said.

In 2023, the ATO launched the SERR regime to curb tax avoidance in the online sharing economy. It required rideshare and short-term accommodation platforms to hand over seller information to improve the ATO’s data matching for tax purposes, helping it crack down on digital economy participants who weren't reporting all of their taxable income.

SERR lodgments are due once every six months, with deadlines on 31 July and 31 January.

The Tax Office expanded this regime in mid-2024 to cover other online service platforms such as Airtasker, Twitch and Menulog. However, Mohammad warned that many platforms covered by the expanded SERR regime were unaware they were caught by the rules, leaving them exposed to hefty late reporting penalties.

Significant global entities – those with over $1 billion in annual turnover – could rack up penalties of up to $825,000 for lodgments over 112 days late. The maximum penalty for smaller entities ($1,600 per late lodgment) could still add up for smaller players.

While nothing had changed in law since mid-2024, Mohammad warned providers that the ATO was likely shifting from a more lenient transitional enforcement approach to “business as usual.”

“We know that platforms are still yet to notice the fact that they're captured, or at least a lot of them still don't believe they're captured or may not realise it,” he said.

“We're now in a business as usual phase. There's a clear expectation that you're doing this and if you're not, the Tax Office is going to go after you as a platform operator.”

Mohammad added that the reporting process wasn’t always straightforward for platforms and could be more time consuming than expected.

“The hardest piece is actually mapping what information you currently have,” he said.

Mohammad explained that the ATO’s XML reporting format required both platform-related information, ABN, address, business scope, as well as seller-related information such as name, ABN and other identifiers.

“The difficulty for platform operators is they don't always collect all of that information as neatly as I've described to you. So they might not be collecting things like ABNs, they might not be collecting all of the details around final sale price or commissions or whatever it might be.”

Gathering the information, cleaning it up in Excel and converting it into the ATO’s preferred XML format also took additional work for first-time reporters.

“Quite often, what happens at the Tax Office when they receive it the first time is they'll send back a whole bunch of validation errors and say, 'hey, you're missing this', or 'this is not in the right column' or whatever it might be.”

“So there might still be some back and forth that needs to happen with the tax office for them to be comfortable that you've given them the right information or at least the information that they want.”

He urged service platform operators to carefully check if they were caught by the regime, warning that ignorance wasn’t an excuse the ATO would accept.

“Eventually, the Tax Office will find you as a platform operator,” he warned. “The Tax Office itself probably has a list of operators and eventually it's going to work its way through and get there. It's just, to me, a question of timing.”

“By the time they get you, if you've got four or five years' worth of non-lodgments, you can add up the numbers as to what that penalty looks like.”