Australia Tax Office (ATO) Deputy Commissioner Michael Monaghan said, "About 30 percent of all investigated cases by the ATO have identification as a major element and we see that about 74 percent of those are basically ID theft rather than creation. I believe the shift is because of the range of processes we have put in place to make it harder to create a false identity," Monaghan said yesterday at the AusCert 2006 conference on Queensland's Gold Coast.

The Australian Taxation Office (ATO) believes a mix of cross-agency data warehousing, alliances, and digital certificates for tax agents is mirroring the efforts of people seeking fraudulent identities; however, a balance still needs to be addressed for the ATO to "come out on top".

Monaghan said the federal government is conscious of this balance and is doing a lot of work into identity crime, but in terms of the ATO, developing strong relationships with organizations like the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission (ACCC) through the identity protection registry has created a great volume of suspect identities and has indicated it is now more useful to protect identities that appear to be stolen.

"In the ATO, a critical measure to the detection of fraud is the building of alliances within our organization. We have strong links to the IT area, particularly IT security, as well as computer forensic capability, and links with data warehouses for mining to track and agencies like Australian Transaction Reports and Analysis Centre (AUSTRAC) for the movement of large amounts of money or international transfers.

"Our relationship with AusCert has provided great value and identified some sophisticated identification crimes from trojans stealing tax agent data and we were able to intercept this before it was used against us."