Recently, the ATO has seen a rise in the number of schemes where taxpayers invent fake businesses in order to submit fictitious Business Activity Statements to obtain illegal refunds. Most of these schemes have been promoted through social media and it has become such an issue that the ATO has commenced Operation Protego to tackle the problem. Under that Operation, it is investigating around $850m in potentially fraudulent payments made to around 40,000 individuals, with $20,000 being the average amount fraudulently refunded.

Click to read our article: Operation Protego: Detecting GST Fraud (0.7 MB PDF)