Hearing catches up with rorters

DODGY businesses and employees who have been rorting the Federal Government’s JobKeeper scheme have been forced to hand back $75m.

At a Senate select committee COVID-19 hearing in Canberra on Thursday the Australian Taxation Office and Treasury officials were quizzed about the $100bn program, including issues with those inappropriately accessing payments.

This included about $60m that was “encouraged” to be paid back and $15m that was forced to be paid back.

The ATO’s second commissioner Jeremy Hirschhorn confirmed they had received more than 9000 tip-offs of people receiving JobKeeper who should not have.

Despite this he confirmed no fines or criminal prosecutions had been laid “yet”.

“We have done a lot of activities chopping people off from JobKeeper on a prospective basis,” he said. “We’ve had a range of activity of clawing back JobKeeper from people where they have claimed it inappropriately.”

Compliance action was taken on about 75,000 applications and about 2200 of these were double-dipping.

The ATO stopped about 55,000 applicants for JobKeeper entering the program.

“We have a smaller number of matters that are going to the police and via the serious financial crimes task force,” Mr Hirschhorn said.

Those doing the wrong thing face fines and possible criminal prosecution.

Under the JobKeeper scheme more than 900,000 businesses have signed up and received $46bn in payments covering about 3.5 million employees.

Many workers receiving JobKeeper are expected to either go off the payments — except those in Victoria — or shift onto JobSeeker as the program is wound back.

Treasury’s deputy secretary of fiscal group Jenny Wilkinson said: “There will definitely be an increase in the number of JobSeeker recipients.”

The ATO estimated by the December quarter about 2.24 million individuals were expected to be receiving JobKeeper.

About 1.45 million Australians are receiving JobSeeker payments — previously known as Newstart.

Treasury’s deputy secretary of macroeconomic group Luke Yeaman said Victoria’s stage four restrictions, which were rolled out at the beginning of August, would cost the economy $10bn to $12bn over the September quarter.

From September 28, payments will fall from $1500 per fortnight to $1200 for full-time employees.