It was a scam so simple it took just minutes on your phone, where you could tell the tax office how much money to pay you, and it came through within days.
The ATO loophole was so vast, tens of thousands of Australians stole a total of $2 billion.
It was Australia’s largest GST fraud. But it did not need to be this way.
New details uncovered by Four Corners show the ATO was warned its systems were badly lacking, but even when it eventually discovered the fraud, it continued to pay out hundreds of millions of dollars.
The ATO maintains it cracked down hard on the scam, moving quickly to shut down the perpetrators and cut off the money.
The case of Linden Phillips would suggest otherwise.
It showcases in granular detail the ATO’s failures and how, while some loopholes are closed, others are being exploited on a far larger scale.
An imaginary business’s giant payday
Linden Phillips was no criminal mastermind, but from his home in the Victorian river town of Mildura, he easily exploited giant flaws in the ATO’s GST refund system.
It was August 2021, and Phillips had just been released from jail. According to court filings, a week after his release, he “opened several bank accounts” in his own name and registered a previously created ABN for GST.
That was step one. Next was proof of concept. This could have taken just two minutes and involved putting just three numbers into the ATO’s systems.
Phillips was able to exploit the flaws in the ATO’s GST refund scheme from his home in Mildura. (Four Corners: Sissy Reyes)
Phillips did this by logging into his myGov account — available on your phone — and going to the ATO’s GST page.
Here, he said his fictitious earth-moving business had recorded minimal sales for the month.
Phillips then said he was entitled to $13,158 as a GST refund. Amazingly, he did not have to specify why this was.
At this stage, no one was required to check the veracity of his Business Activity Statement before paying.
The ATO simply assumed he had invested in stock or capital equipment during the quarter. As the court noted, “the appellant [Phillips] did not engage in a business and had no income or outgoings for such a business”.
Within a week, the money was in his bank account. That was the trial run. Phillips was only just getting started.
The next month, he lodged 46 separate GST refund claims seeking $821,279 from the ATO.
The problem was that Phillips had been in jail for most of the time covered by these claims. Despite this, the ATO paid up promptly.
Once again, the ATO had not made a single inquiry before paying the money. The algorithm in its system, rather than any human, approved the refund.
To claim such a giant GST refund, Phillips would have needed to spend around $9.7 million on his business over three years. All this while having minimal sales, yet enough cash flow to not bother claiming the GST refund each month. Somehow, this was not a red flag when the ATO was paying out the money.
Just weeks after Phillips made his second claim, someone at the ATO twigged that his enterprise may not be legitimate.
Finally, there was a human in the loop. An ATO officer rang Phillips and was told the statements had been prepared by his accountant, for which he provided a name and number.
“The number was in fact registered to a different person … not an accountant but a painter,” according to the court documents.
The ATO followed up with a letter to Phillips, which he ignored. As he did to further calls and emails from the ATO.
Despite the suspicious behaviour, the ATO did nothing. In the meantime, Phillips bought himself a Porsche and his mother a house.
The actual breakthrough
The ATO would sit on its hands for the next four months, giving pause to its claim to have cracked down hard and quickly brought the scam under control.
When Phillips was caught, it had nothing to do with the ATO. He was arrested in April 2022 by Mildura detective Vanessa Power, who was searching his home looking for drugs and guns.
She checked Phillips’s phone and “identified a series of fraudulent ATO claims,” according to Victoria Police.
That led police to a further 63 other offenders in the Mildura area.
It was around this time that the ATO began to take the threat seriously.
Four months after it first identified a problem with Phillips’s GST refunds, the ATO launched Operation Protego, led by its Serious Financial Crimes taskforce. By this time, the ATO estimates $850 million had been stolen from the tax system.
The ATO has only recovered $96 million — just 5 per cent of the money stolen from the tax system. (Four Corners: Sissy Reyes)
While Protego was operating, then-federal assistant treasurer Stephen Jones said it was “pretty easy to work out whether” some had lodged a “legitimate” GST claim or not.
“There’s lots of analytics that the ATO can do to work out whether this is a legitimate business or not,” he said.
That may have been true, but the ATO was not identifying many of these false claims until after the money had been paid.
It would take the tax office 18 months to get the scam under control, and by this time, $2 billion had been stolen from the tax system.
The ATO said when it launched Operation Protego that it assigned 470 extra staff to verify GST claims, and that by May 2022, “almost all fraud attempts were being stopped”.
All up, the ATO estimated 57,000 people were involved in the scam. Of these, just 122 have been convicted, while the ATO has only recovered $96 million — just 5 per cent of the money stolen from the tax system. The banks have helped recover another $64 million by freezing accounts.
ATO was warned
In the years leading up to the scam, the ATO’s analysis showed its fraud detection systems, which should have prevented the scam, were not up to scratch.
A 2018 report unearthed by Four Corners outlined how the systems were lacking.
The report’s author, Ali Noroozi, spent 10 years as the inspector general of taxation. Citing the ATO’s internal data, he found that its so-called risk assessment systems were only marginally better than random selection.
“They have certainly been on notice that their risk assessment tools could do better,” Mr Noroozi told Four Corners.
Ali Noroozi was the inspector general of taxation for a decade. (Four Corners: Sissy Reyes)
The tax office was slow to heed this warning, and then it also downgraded its assessment of external fraud risks from “severe” to “low” two months before the scam took off in mid-2021.
It said the likelihood of risk had gone from “almost certain” to “rare”.
The tax office said it began building and updating new fraud detection systems even before the critical 2018 inspector general report.
But the auditor general noted one of the ATO’s new fraud detection systems ran a year late and was therefore not fully switched on until January 2022. At this point, it successfully detected the massive fraud, but it still took the tax office a further three months to launch Operation Protego.
The auditor general found “the ATO did not have a procedure to respond to a large-scale external fraud event” like the GST scams.
Watch as Four Corners investigates one of the most powerful and secretive institutions in the country, tonight on ABC TV and ABC iview.
Tax experts said these processes need humans in the loop.
“Before money goes out the door, particularly if there’s been large changes in a taxpayer’s details or accounts, that should be verified,” said Karen Payne, who stepped down last year as inspector general of taxation.
“Once upon a time, there was a desk audit when you first lodged your GST return to make sure you are carrying on a business that you can verify and these amounts that you’re claiming are legitimate.”
Karen Payne says there needs to be proper verification before “money goes out the door”. (Four Corners: Sissy Reyes)
As the Abbott government swept to power in 2013, the ATO was moving away from this model of human verification to an automated system.
That would eventually see around 1,000 staff — or half the people in the division responsible for the GST — lose their jobs.
“I’m not sure the ATO has ever recovered from that sort of drain of knowledge and drain of skill sets,” said Stephen Hathway, a liquidator currently investigating a large-scale GST fraud.
“The people [at the ATO] work really hard and diligently, but there just needs to be more of them. And there needs to be more regard to getting out there in the field and making those inquiries.”
A bigger GST failure
While the ATO has claimed to have contained smaller-scale GST frauds as part of Operation Protego, it has struggled to stop loopholes being exploited by larger-scale scams.
Stephen Hathway has seen this up close.
Stephen Hathway is a liquidator who currently investigates large-scale GST fraud. (Four Corners: Sissy Reyes)
He is currently chasing Nahi Gazal, who claims to be a wealthy Sydney property developer, but has been accused of masterminding a giant GST fraud.
Gazal and his associates managed to squeeze more than $21 million out of the tax office in GST refunds.
They allegedly used fake invoices to claim GST refunds for building projects that either did not exist or had been completed by other developers.
Once again, the ATO did not bother to do even the most basic of checks.
“It never had any legitimacy,” Mr Hathway said.
“There’s nothing in it that ever demonstrates any act of commerce or enterprise. The whole set of transactions were completely and utterly made up, fraudulent, had no basis.”
By September 2023, the ATO had issued Gazal with a $44 million tax bill, including penalty interest.
Four Corners can reveal that while the ATO was chasing Gazal for that money, it failed to detect that he was using a new string of companies to continue scamming the tax office.
Mr Hathway has been funded by the ATO to pursue Gazal over this latest scheme, and has connected him to an additional 22 companies, which Mr Hathway said have fraudulently claimed another $25 million in GST refunds.
Once again, Gazal claimed to be a property developer.
“Not one bag of nails was bought from Bunnings,” Mr Hathway said.
But once again, the ATO did not check before paying out the GST refunds to Gazal’s companies.
Mr Hathway said the ATO never asked basic questions, like the address of the properties being developed, whether a development application had been approved, or to even look at a building contract.
“I’m the liquidator after the event. And then when we’re looking into the file, we find nothing,” Mr Hathway said.
Mr Hathway was not hopeful the ATO would be able to recover much of the money, and said there was nothing to stop someone else from doing the same thing.
Karen Payne said the tax office needed to do better, as these frauds resulted in less money for essential services.
“We should all care because it raises revenues that allow the government … to fund the services that we all benefit from … health, defence, security, infrastructure … it’s pretty key part of our democracy.”
Watch Four Corners’ full investigation into the tax system, No Return, tonight from 8:30pm on ABC TV and ABC iview.
