A former employee of the Australian Tax Office (ATO) has been sentenced to five years in prison for corrupt conduct, which included accepting bribes to reduce the debt of a taxpayer he was auditing.
The offender was found to have reduced millions of dollars of personal and business tax debt spanning over six years, with the conduct only ending after he was arrested.
The sentencing was made public under the recently introduced National Anti-Corruption Commission (NACC), which took over the investigation in July 2023 from the now-dissolved Australian Commission for Law Enforcement Integrity and the ATO.
Following a guilty plea in July 2023, the Parramatta District Court on Tuesday convicted the offender of numerous breaches of the Commonwealth Criminal Code, which included accepting a bribe as a Commonwealth official, abuse of public office and unauthorised access and disclosure of restricted data.
The offender’s five-year sentence includes a non-parole period of two years and six months.
