Financial services minister Kelly O’Dwyer says she is ‘deeply concerned’ about allegations raised by ABC and Fairfax

This article is more than 2 years old

This article is more than 2 years old

The Turnbull government has called for an urgent investigation into the Australian Tax Office after a joint Fairfax/Four Corners investigation exposed the ATO’s use of allegedly unethical revenue raising methods.

The financial services minister, Kelly O’Dwyer, says she is “deeply concerned” about allegations raised in the ABC’s Four Corners program, Mongrel Bunch of Bastards, which aired on Monday evening.

A spokesperson for O’Dwyer issued a statement on Tuesday: “The minister has requested a thorough investigation of all allegations raised and the government will be responding once it has had an opportunity to consider that in detail.”

AFP raid home of tax office whistleblower over ABC investigation Read more

Treasury has been asked to run the investigation and to report back to O’Dwyer as expeditiously as possible.

The ATO, the inspector general of taxation and the small business ombudsman will be expected to cooperate with the investigation.

O’Dwyer’s announcement came a few hours after the Labor leader, Bill Shorten, said he planned to pursue the allegations raised by the joint Fairfax/Four Corners investigation “with some degree of ferocity”.

“This is an issue which we’re going investigate when we return to parliament,” he said. “I think it is scandalous.”

Andrew Leigh, the shadow assistant treasurer, has also welcomed O’Dwyer’s announcement.

Last week, just days before the Four Corners story was due to go to air, the Australian federal police raided the home of the ATO whistleblower who featured in the program, Richard Boyle.

Boyle, who worked at the ATO since 2005 but is now suspended, told the ABC that his Adelaide home was raided on Wednesday morning last week by three officers from the AFP and an ATO investigator.

The tax office said the search warrant on Boyle’s home was issued because it believed he had accessed information he should not have and provided it to journalists.

“This is an astonishing use of public resources, to investigate someone who has passionately and with every fibre of my being tried to assist taxpayers in meeting their tax obligations and to enforce taxpayers who are ripping the country off by not paying their fair share of tax,” Boyle told reporter Adele Ferguson.

“They’ve spent the past couple of hours going through our drawers, going through our personal belongings and documents.”



O’Dwyer said the Coalition government had a strong record of putting in place the right mechanisms to protect small businesses in Australia.

“It was the Coalition government that established the inspector general of taxation in 2003 and then boosted its powers to provide taxpayers with more specialised and focused complaint handling for tax matters in the 2014-15 budget,” a spokesperson for O’Dwyer said.

“We also established the small business and family enterprise ombudsman in 2016, appointing small business advocate Kate Carnell as the inaugural ombudsman to represent and advocate for small businesses across Australia.”

O’Dwyer and Leigh both drew attention to the number of job losses endured by the ATO in recent years but offered contradictory explanations for the job losses – with each blaming the other for the reduced numbers.

