Sorry for the Murdoch rag, but I thought we could do with a trashy article to lighten things up a bit. Anyone else claimed depreciation on a boob job or the family pet?
I read that as boob job on the family pet and was immediately intrigued and horrified.
There are a lot of people who claim anything they think they can argue is related to them doing work and don’t realise that there are only specific things that are allowed to be claimed. Combined with people also thinking that someone in the tax office is checking and approving their returns a lot of dodgy deduction ideas get passed around on the basis that it was accepted when they claimed their tax.
Some people have potential to end up owing a lot of money back if they are ever audited. Unfortunately/fortunately (depending on your perspective) most people don’t get audited so it never catches up with them. And having to pay back 7 years of dodgy claims compared to the benefit of getting away with it all the other years probably makes it worthwhile anyway.
We had a meeting with our new accountants recently and she was saying that she had a client who was a builder who tried to claim his new spa pool.
Any idea how they tried to justify that? Like did they just think anything they built should be deductable, of was it more “I have a hard job and I need it to relax” type argument?
They argued they used it for entertaining potential clients. (I know, right!)
Oh yeah, of course. I always insist on hopping in the spa with any a new builder.🤣
ATO need to automate their auditing. Catch’em quickly.
This doesn’t really make sense. You don’t have to describe all your deductions when you do your tax. You just put the dollar amount. These people only got audited either randomly or because they were an outlier and claimed more than the typical person in their profession. Only then were the asked what was that 10k expense was and got told it was for a boob job.
I think this has the potential to be big over the next few years. Imagine machine learning going nuts over every return for the last 7 years night and day for peanuts. Auto contacting people to provide receipts, it could likely audit a million people at once and not blink.
