The Commissioner of Taxation has gazetted the Notice of a residential investment property loan (RIPL) data-matching program 3 April 2023.
It enables the ATO to acquire residential investment property loan (“RIPL”) data from authorised financial institutions for 2021-22 through to 2025-26 and data match this information to taxpayers’ income tax returns.
The data items include:
- taxpayer identification details (names, addresses, phone numbers, dates of birth, etc)
- account details (account numbers, BSB’s, balances, commencement, and end dates, etc)
- transaction details (transaction date, transaction amount etc).
- property details (addresses, etc)
The ATO estimates that records relating to approximately 1.7 million individuals will be obtained each financial year.
The data will be acquired and matched against ATO records for:
- Rental property schedule interest on loans and/or borrowing expense labels and
- Rental income tax return labels
The ATO will also use the information to generate data analytics and insights to:
- Identify relevant cases for administrative action, including compliance activities and educational strategies; and
- identify and educate individuals who may be failing to meet their reporting or lodgment obligations (or both) and assist them to comply with:
- lodgement of income tax returns; and
- the correct reporting of rental property loan interest and borrowing expense deductions in rental property schedules, and associated labels of the income tax return; and
- the correct reporting of net capital gains in income tax returns for properties used to derive income
Realistically, you should expect more compliance activity in this space going forward.
What should I do now?
Please contact your accountant or feel free to contact us if you’d like more information about ATO’s increased focus on rental properties and data matching.
