Tax office has revealed it's been defrauded of more than half a billion dollars
The tax office has revealed, it's been defrauded of more than half a billion dollars in the last two years. It says criminals have stolen the money by cheating the ATO's identity security settings.
Transcript
00:00 This Melbourne woman got a nasty surprise when she went to her accountant to file her
00:06 tax return in November.
00:07 He goes into the agent's portal and he says, "Oh, this has already been lodged."
00:12 And I said, "Well, I didn't do it!"
00:14 $25,000 had been claimed in refunds by someone impersonating her.
00:19 That fraudster had been able to create a false myGov account and link it to her tax file.
00:24 They had cheated the myGov identity checks by having just a few of her details, including
00:29 her bank account number, something most of us frequently share with other people.
00:34 Now the tax office has admitted more than $550 million has been claimed by criminals
00:40 successfully exploiting the system and hacking into the accounts of over 15,000 genuine taxpayers.
00:47 Some of the claims were stopped before they were paid out, but many others were not.
00:52 If this is actually a whole lot of other people as well and they're not looking in their tax
00:56 files, they're never even going to know this is happening.
00:59 And as taxpayers, we're all going to end up wearing that.
01:03 The Australian tax office has defended its identity security processes, saying it's a
01:08 balance between making it easy for people to use and making it hard for people trying
01:13 to cheat the system.
01:14 Cyber experts say the ATO needs to tell people where the vulnerabilities are in the system
01:19 so they can protect themselves.
01:21 If people don't know what they're looking for, then they're missing out on an opportunity
01:24 to defend themselves by checking up on the potential fraud.
01:28 It's the first month of the new financial year, tax time, and a prime time for criminals
01:33 to exploit the system.
01:35 Seven months after the ABC first revealed the hack, the ATO now says it's implementing
01:40 new systems to monitor suspicious activity in accounts where a new myGov link has been
01:45 made.
01:46 [BLANK_AUDIO]