Australia: Guidance on arrangements used in fraudulent GST refund claims
Guidance on arrangements that seek to fraudulently claim large GST refunds
The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) released guidance on certain arrangements that seek to fraudulently claim large goods and services tax (GST) refunds.
According to the ATO, these arrangements can vary but have some, or all, of the following features:
- False invoicing between related parties (for example, inflated invoices or issuing invoices when no goods or services are provided)
- Deliberately misaligning GST accounting methods across a group to contrive a GST refund
- Duplicating GST credit claims in related entities for a single high-value transaction
- Claiming GST credits for alleged purchases, development, and construction (by related entities) that never occurred
- The use of straw directors to try and hide the true relationship between related parties