“Prefill for ATO” is a feature that allows tax agents or tax practitioners to retrieve information already reported to the Australian Taxation Office (ATO) and populate the relevant fields in a taxpayer's income tax return.
Its main advantage is to save time, reduce manual data entry, and improve the accuracy of tax return preparation.
An example of an ATO prefill view -
Examples of information that may be prefilled
Depending on the information available from the ATO, this may include:
Salary and wages / PAYG income
Interest income from banks
Dividend income
Government payments
Superannuation income
Private health insurance details
Managed fund distributions
HELP/HECS balances
Other reported tax-related information
Prefill does not mean the tax return is automatically complete or ready for lodgment.
Not all information may be available yet.
Some income statements may still be unfinalised.
Business income, deductions and other information may still need to be entered manually.
Tax agents must verify the prefilled information against supporting documents before lodging.
Note:
- There is NO prefill button for CTR and TRT, unlike for ITR which has that capability.
- Some information from the ATO may not be available in Lodgeit immediately after it has been reported or lodged. This is because the ATO may need time to process and make the information available through its systems.
- We recommend all users to prefill the form again if few months passed after form creation. Because, ATO changes amounts in prefill, though a rare case, but there is a chances
- Lodgeit retrieves prefill information directly from the ATO. If the information has not yet been made available by the ATO, it will not appear in Lodgeit until the ATO releases it.