Tax Office On Trail Of Bad Assessments
The Age
Thursday March 19, 1992
Taxation Office audits have found that most car dealers, concreters and bricklayers are either understating their income, inflating their deductions, or both, the Tax Commissioner, Mr Trevor Boucher, said yesterday.
Giving the first results from the audits that form the main check on taxpayers' self-assessment, Mr Boucher said that only 37 per cent of concreters and bricklayers audited had stated their income and deductions correctly on their tax returns.
The other 63 per cent were found to owe the Tax Office an average of $6900 each. But that amount was dwarfed by the pickings from other industries.
While operators of backpackers' hostels were mostly an honest bunch, with 67 per cent assessing their tax correctly, the other third on average were $13,200 out, Mr Boucher said.
As for car dealers, the Tax Office audits have not helped their reputation. Only 41 per cent of dealers assessed their tax correctly, and on average the others erred in their own favor by ``in the order of $20,000", he said.
Speaking to the Australian Society of Certified Public Accountants in Sydney, Mr Boucher gave no details of audits on the other three occupations that opinion polls rank with used car dealers as the least trustworthy members of society: real estate agents, politicians and journalists. A Tax Office spokeswoman refused to give further details.
Other groups emerged well from the audits. For example, 93 per cent of wheatgrowers assessed their tax correctly, and the rest on average were out by only $300. Moreover, 74 per cent of operators of take-away food outlets were found to have got it right _ ``a figure that we think we should check out further", Mr Boucher said.
The commissioner said much of the problem stemmed from a failure to keep proper records, particularly in industries dealing mainly in cash. He warned that it was naive for people to think that they could evade tax by not keeping records and/or failing to lodge returns. The Tax Office had ``an increasingly wide range of data" to catch up with them.
Mr Boucher also took the accountants to task over the exaggerated level of work-related expenses claimed by taxpayers.
© 1992 The Age
