• The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) says there are still a raft of companies that incorrectly accepted government assistance through the federal JobKeeper scheme over the past year.
• Many businesses that saw profits above pre-pandemic levels have voluntarily repaid the money received, including Nick Scali, Domino’s, Super Retail Group.
• The agency had already recovered about $138 million in fees from businesses that fraudulently accepted government assistance, it said.
• Visit Business Insider Australia’s homepage for more stories.

The ATO has announced it is seeking to recoup $284 million in JobKeeper payments from companies that fraudulently accepted government assistance.

The agency has already recovered about $138 million in fees from businesses.

It said it had identified companies and individuals which still owe the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) hundreds of millions of dollars for trying to rort stimulus payments including the JobKeeper wage subsidy.

While some companies that have made public declarations that they have paid or are paying back JobKeeper funds include Toyota, Domino’s and Super Retail Group, many others have not, the tax agency said.

An ATO spokesperson told the ABC that some businesses had invented wages to get the cash flow boost subsidy and are being pursued.

They said the agency had applied penalties to more than 115 JobKeeper matters, and that 47 businesses were currently seeking to make JobKeeper repayments.

“Of these, 33 [companies] have repaid $159 million, there are another 14 the ATO are in discussions with for another $66 million, and [there is] a total $225 million to be potentially paid back,” they said.

The ATO spokesman said the agency was still chasing another $82 million, and that it had identified $64 million which had been “claimed in good faith and passed onto employees.”

The actions by the ATO at the end of the financial year come almost a year after the government’s federal wage subsidy program was launched to support businesses in retaining workers following nation-wide lockdowns in March 2020.

Since the JobKeeper wage subsidy was introduced, almost 3.8 million workers employed by more than one million businesses have received over $89 billion in payments.

An estimated 900,000 Australian workers were still receiving the wage subsidy as of March 9 this year.

The spokesperson said that as part of its Jobkeeper compliance program, the agency had reviewed more than 200 matters for suspected possible fraud against the payment scheme.

In March, a report from corporate governance advisory firm Ownership Matters found that one-fifth of the JobKeeper payments made to Australia’s biggest ASX-listed companies ended up in the accounts of profitable businesses.

The analysis sparked concern at the time that the $83 billion scheme was being abused by parts of corporate Australia, and showed that 66 of the ASX’s top 300 companies claimed a total of $1.38 billion in JobKeeper payments for the six months to the end of December 2020.

The report also found 34 of those companies claimed profits above pre-COVID levels, suggesting some businesses that received government payments flourished as pandemic restrictions eased.

Those 34 companies were cleared to receive up to $284 million in JobKeeper subsidies.

Many profitable companies including Nick Scali, Domino’s, Super Retail Group, and Australian resources giant Iluka have voluntarily repaid part or all of the subsidies they accrued.

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