Gazette notice: Commissioner of Taxation – Notice of the Services Australia specified benefits and entitlements data-matching program, 17 June 2024

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) will acquire Medicare Exemption Statement (MES) data from Services Australia for 2024 financial year through to 2026 financial year inclusively.

The data items include:

• Full name, date of birth, residential address
• Entitlement status, and approved entitlement period details.

We estimate that records relating to approximately 180,000 individuals will be obtained each financial year.

The objectives of this program are to:

• ensure individuals are correctly claiming exemption from payment of the Medicare levy and Medicare levy surcharge
• work with taxpayers and intermediaries to better understand the identified risks and trends for non-compliance
• develop education strategies so compliance is better understood and easier in the future
• speed up processing of tax returns and payment of refunds to taxpayers who are genuinely entitled to claim these exemptions
• undertake verification activities where the information obtained indicates a taxpayer may not be entitled to claim the exemption, either partly or in its entirety
• help ensure that individuals and businesses are fulfilling their tax and super registration, lodgment, reporting and payment obligations
• promote voluntary compliance by communicating how we use external data with our own, to help encourage taxpayers to comply with their tax and super obligations.

A document describing this program is available at ato.gov.au/dmprotocols.

This program follows the Office of the Australian Information Commissioner’s Guidelines on data matching in Australian Government administration (2014) (the guidelines). The guidelines include standards for the use of data matching as an administrative tool in a way that:

• complies with the Australian Privacy Principles (APPs) and the Privacy Act 1988 (Privacy Act)
• is consistent with good privacy practice.

A full copy of the ATO’s privacy policy can be accessed at ato.gov.au/privacy.