International Law

The Assistant Treasurer and Minister for Competition Policy and Consumer Affairs, the Hon Chris Bowen MP, has released for public consultation an exposure draft Confidentiality of Taxpayer Information Bill and explanatory materials.

The exposure draft Bill proposes to consolidate, into a single comprehensive framework, taxation secrecy and disclosure provisions that are currently found across some 18 taxation law acts.

In addition to simplifying and reducing the volume of the existing law, the key elements of the exposure draft Bill are that:

• It maintains current levels of disclosure that can be made by the ATO to other government agencies;
• It introduces some new disclosure provisions where the public benefit in disclosure outweighs taxpayer privacy; and
• It includes clear rules to govern the on-disclosure of information provided by the ATO to another agency or entity.

The closing date for submissions is 17 April 2009