Kelly O'Dwyer (Higgins, Liberal Party, Minister for Small Business) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to thank the member for Corangamite for that very important question, and can I say the people of Corangamite have made a very excellent choice in their advocate in this place. Serious financial crime has the potential to undermine the Australian economy. Its estimated cost to the Australian taxpayer is around $15 billion every year. That is why today, in this place, the Minister for Justice and I were able to launch the Serious Financial Crime Taskforce. This Serious Financial Crime Taskforce is made up of eight agencies, led in many respects by the Australian Taxation Office, which received in the last budget $127 million to undertake those activities and to ensure that they have the financial capacity and the powers that they need to do the job. The job that they need to do is to make sure that they can catch those people who are engaged in international tax evasion, fraudulent phoenix activity and also the abuse of trusts, to name just some of those activities. It builds off the success of Project Wickenby, which was a successful taskforce that convicted 46 individuals of serious financial crime and recovered almost $1 billon in revenue. The Serious Financial Crime Taskforce is already acting. From 1 July this year, the Serious Financial Crime Taskforce has eight investigations on foot and it ranges across 10 international jurisdictions.

The Australian Taxation Office has already instigated over 580 audits and has raised $85 million in liabilities since 1 July this year. So we are not waiting. We are closing the net on those people who are looking to seriously attack the integrity of our tax system and we will bring those people to justice who ought to be brought to justice. It is incredibly important to know that, when we bring them to justice, penalties are very severe: up to 25 years imprisonment for those people who are engaged in money-laundering and up to 10 years for each offence for those people who are engaged in fraud under the Commonwealth Criminal Code. There are very significant civil penalties as well, where people have to pay up to 90 per cent of the tax avoided, plus statutory interest. We are serious about financial crime and we hope that those opposite will join us in that fight.

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